Clarence, I'm most appreciative for your post.
although your perl script doesn't work for me as is... I was able to use it to make one that DOES work. what REALLY confuses me now, is that my perl script WILL access ldap, and produce results - but when I try the same thing using ldapsearch from bash, NO Go ! .... to be honest, at this point, if it works in perl, I don't care that it doesn't from bash... now I need to get exim working! TX again!!