There are two ways of passing data to a subroutine:
- call by value
- call by reference
References are always a good idea - especially if you have large or complex datastructures, but using values is much easier in the beginning. Here's an example that I've posted earlier this day on a german perl-community site. Two array-references gets passed to a function in an anonymous hash:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my @numbers = (1..10);
my @words = qw(hello world outside);
function( {NUMBERS=>\@numbers , WORDS=>\@words} );
exit;
sub function {
die "no parameter!\n" unless @_;
my %opt = %{ shift @_ };
print Dumper \%opt;
my @i_words = $opt{WORDS};
print Dumper \@i_words;
my @i_numbers = $opt{NUMBERS};
print Dumper \@i_numbers;
}