OK thanks.

I will confess that I found it weird that the problem is "possible typo" and not complaining because of unknwon variable. Eventually I paid more attention to the so-frequent error message Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name (did you forget to declare "my $x"?) at... I realised that it says "requires explicit package name" whereas I have usually been concentrating on "did you forget to declare?" part. Combined with your message and LanX's Another effect of strict (vars) is to enforce pre declaration of unqualified variables with my or our. I get to understand it, hopefully fully.

So, evidently, one can get away with declaring variables using my/our completely if it uses fully-qualified variables. So use strict; $main::x = 42; will succeed whereas use strict; $x = 42; will fail.

thanks, bw, bliako