Thanks for your reply -- and welcome to The Monastery.

Here's the way this site works: people post questions about Perl on the site, and other people answer them.

Sometimes the questions spark an interesting discussion about computer science, algorithms, operating systems -- it can be quite fascinating. Sometimes people are directed to the excellent documentation that's already available (I've even contributed to the docs myself -- it's awesome to see your own name in Perl's credits).

And sometimes people have a question about their code. When the code isn't provided directly, it's a bit of a thought experiment to figure out what might be wrong. The whole thing's a black box. This can be entertaining, but it's most likely unsatisfying for the developer trying to solve their problem. So we encourage the posting of the code in question directly on this site, rather than provided by a link off-site.

Why? Because sometimes the discussion we have today can be useful in a year's time. And in a year, the file that you've put on bitbucket.org (or whatever) could be gone, leaving a bit of a hole in the discussion.

In addition, if you can pare down your example to the barest of necessities to show the problem (and, of course, use strict and use warnings), that will make it easy for us to diagnose the problem and provide a solution.

And this is a somewhat long-winded post, but I'm attempting to forestall the inevitable back-and-forth that happens when a new member arrives.

Post something useful, read, learn, listen, become a better developer. And (this is my favorite Larry Wall quote), ".. have the appropriate amount of fun."