I have some cron jobs running perl for many hours. Sometimes I would like to control things dynamically or even shutdown the job if I notice it is not running properly (based on the log files). Below is what I am doing presently (inside a loop) and I feel there must be a more elegant solution where I can label my values. Presently my file "delay.txt" looks like 1 1 And I would prefer it look like delay= 1; continue = 1; Thanks, Siegfried sub getDelay{ local *FILE; my $delay; my $continue; open (FILE,"delay.txt"); $delay = <FILE>; $continue = <FILE>; $delay = $delay + 0; # force integer close(FILE); return ($delay, $continue); }