my $href = @_;
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Evaluating an array as a scalar returns the number of elements in the array, so at this point $href contains '1'. You want either my($href) = @_; or my $href = shift;, or something similar that will maintain the array context you are looking for.

Thanks! This was something that took me a while to get right when I was first learning perl, and now I see why. In the camel book the line is:

my ($cref, $dref) = @_;
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For some reason, I had associated the () with the my... Now it makes perfect sense. Thanks.

gnubbs

Actually, in that case the parens are associated with my. You can think of my as a function just like any other function and the parens group and specify its arguments. The reason you can assign to it is because my returns a list of its newly scoped arguments, which are then assigned to like any other list assignment.

kelan

---

Perl6 Grammar Student

IMHO, "shift" is the better way to get arguments off of @_. If you start using "shift", you'll never get confused about scalar vs. list context, etc.

So,

     my ($cref, $dref) = @_;
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becomes

     my $cref = shift;
     my $dref = shift;
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Very clean, very easy. No confusion :-)

HTH.

But a second problem is that prototypes change the way you have to call your sub. With a prototype \%, perl wants you to pass in a hash, and it will pass on a reference to it to the sub. So the call should look like:

get_conf(%cur_conf);
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Similar, with a prototype \@, you must pass in an array, not an array reference:

sub mypush (\@@) {
    my $aref = shift;
    push @$aref, @_;
}

@a = (1);
mypush @a, 2, 3, 4;
print "@a\n";
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