Well done on wrestling with VMWare like that anyway! That takes me back to the time before I ditched it for QEMU… To this day, I believe it's the only non-Windows-only hypervisor offering addons for Win9x, so that's good, at least for people like us!
A Perl script parsing the output of an "ls*" huh? When I see such hackery from professionals, it makes me feel much better about what I do in my spare time.





