But in general, using a hash really is a lot more secure than trying to do what the OP wants. Especially considering that perl uses quite a lot of special variables that could be overwritten that way (and that's assuming the code itself uses lexicals exclusively, which it probably doesn't).

(mainly, it concatenates duplicate variables, using the "\0" character)



I just ran into that issue and spent a few days trying to figure out what I thought was a UTF-8 encoding issue. So much fun.