I thought of something that *should* work, but I just can't come up with the code. Push a reference to each variable you want to assign to ($records[n]->{bytes}) onto an array and use that as the left hand side. Here's my code and its output:

my $num = 4;
my @records = (
          { bytes => 'foo0'},
          { bytes => 'foo1'},
          { bytes => 'foo2'},
          { bytes => 'foo3'},
          );

my @results;
for (1 .. $num) {
  push (@results, [ $records[$_]->{bytes} ]);
}

@results = get_bytes($num);

print Dumper (\@records);

sub get_bytes {
  my $num = shift;
  my @ret;
  push (@ret, $_) for 1 .. $num;
  return @ret;
}
--------------
$VAR1 = [
          {
            'bytes' => 'foo0'
          },
          {
            'bytes' => 'foo1'
          },
          {
            'bytes' => 'foo2'
          },
          {
            'bytes' => 'foo3'
          },
          {}
        ];
[download]

Notice the extra anonymous hash tacked onto the end of the (otherwise unchanged) @records array after calling get_bytes() Hmm, something tells me I would need to dereference each element in @results before calling the sub, but I'm stuck. Anybody have any ideas, or is my thinking just Not Good in this case?

--

There are 10 kinds of people -- those that understand binary, and those that don't.