Much better (IMO) perl code (it only does regeneration, not normal install-info jobs) is at http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/T/TH/THEDEVIL/generate-info-dir.pl it has only the following dependencies use FileHandle; use Fcntl qw(SEEK_SET :mode); use DirHandle; use Locale::gettext; use Getopt::Std qw(getopts); use Config; but it can use Text::Autoformat if it is present to align the descriptions. Best, i