No apology needed grinder. I appreciate the attention to detail and sound advice you provide. Your previous comments on reputer have caused a measurable improvement in my coding habits.

My only excuse for not using ref or wantarray is not being familiar enough with them to have known to use them. The mode parameter did become more useful when extending the sub. I posted a simpler version of the one I use, which includes this write line. But $mode is now gone and this just checks for a 4th param:

print IO Data::Dumper->new([$data],[$name])->Indent(2)->Quotekeys(0)->
+Dump if $name;
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By the way your wantarray line wouldn't work until I added returns:

wantarray ? return @file : return join '', @file;
[download]

Thanks again, I've updated the snippet with your improvements.