Nothing to be surprised at.

Well, it obviously suprised me. Thanks for telling me that this is normal behaviour, and I've done something stupid.

Is that a syntax screw-up on my part then?? In my perl books, the closest syntax I can find is $hash{$key}{'string'} = $value, and that's pretty much what I've always used. I thought maybe the backslashes in the path were what was causing it. I've tried puting quotes around the vars (both single and double), escaping said quotes, and a few different syntaxes using the -> and => operators, etc.... I'm talking desperation stuff.

Could someone at least point me to something that will give my desperation some focus??

Here is an old write-up of mine that uses the same $MAIN::PageInfo{$section}{$pnum} = $_; style of putting things into a hash....

Is this much like the last write-up where something is falling out of scope?

Update

From perldsc -

# reading from file
 # flintstones: lead=fred pal=barney wife=wilma pet=dino
 while ( <> ) {
     next unless s/^(.*?):\s*//;
     $who = $1;
     for $field ( split ) {
         ($key, $value) = split /=/, $field;
         $HoH{$who}{$key} = $value;
     }
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That looks like roughly what I have, without the variables localized. I see I initialize $SubOption at the split, but even with that moved to the top of the sub it still fails.