Is the best practice simply to code more defensively and explicitly check all variables are initialized prior to interpolation? I could do that, I guess, but I'm afraid of bloating the code needlessly.

because this drives me nuts, too. I am still very new to perl, at the stage where those warnings Do look like "noise" to me. I don't understand why I should have to explicitly set all my variables to a value to avoid this problem. If indeed, that's what I need to do. Particularly when the resulting output is what I want.

If anyone could point me toward some relevant pages here or in the Llama/ Camel books explaining this, I'd be very grateful.

Pax,
NovMonk