Aric,
Thanks for the example code. Reviewing yours + mine reveals that I had an error in my perl code.
For anyone who cares, this line:
for ( my $x =0 ; $x < $#ARGV ; $x++ ) {
should have been
for ( my $x =0 ; $x < @ARGV ; $x++ ) {
$#ARGV is the last element number of the array @ARGV, @ARGV is the count of elements.