I'd suggest a different call sequence for "yoink()":

  yoink( \@arr, $var ); # pass an array ref and a scalar
[download]

The sub definition could go something like this, if you don't mind making a copy of the array in order to do the work:

sub yoink
{
    my ($arr_ref, $kill_pattern) = @_;
    my @out_arr;
    for (@$arr_ref) {
        push @out_arr, $_ unless (/^$kill_pattern$/)
    }
    @$arr_ref = @out_arr;
}
[download]

The "yoink" could also use the "splice" function (see perldoc -f splice) to edit the array in place; I suspect the "optimal" choice would depend on array size and number of elements being removed -- with big arrays, doing just a few edits will go best with splice, but doing lots of edits might go quicker using selective copying to a separate array. (For small arrays, there won't be a noticeable difference.)

update: IO's solution is better than mine, of course. (I just forgot that I should've known better...)

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