Monks

In my current program I wish the user to be given feedback as to the execution time of various sections of the program. As such I have broken the program into a series of logical operations, each contained within a subroutine. I am using the Benchmark module included with perl to measure execution time. Some of the subroutines do not require parameters and thus the following is fine:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark;

sub stuff()
{
    my $x = 1000000;
    foreach my $i (1..$x)
    {
    print "."
    }
    print "\n";
}

my $t;
$t = timeit(1, \&stuff);
print "Timings: ", timestr($t), "\n";
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However, some of the stages that I wish to time take parameters that are passed from the command line. the following code demonstrates the problem.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark;

sub stuff($)
{
    my $x = shift;
    foreach my $i (1..$x)
    {
    print "."
    }
    print "\n";
}

my $t;
$t = timeit(1, \&stuff(1000000));
print "Timings: ", timestr($t), "\n";
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The code has no syntax errors and the subroutine runs. However, instead of outputting timings, once the sub has executed the following error is output:

Undefined subroutine &main::SCALAR called at (eval 2) line 1.
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Is it possible for me to time code like this... or must I use a different approach. I could use the time function and just find the difference for each subroutine before and after, but this in inflexible and I would rather do it properly.

Thanks in advance,