#! perl -sw use 5.010; use strict; use List::Util qw[ shuffle ]; our $I ||= 1e6; sub genHash { my %hash; @hash{ shuffle 'a'..'d' } = 1 .. 4; return \%hash; } my $datum = join ' ', keys %{ genHash() }; warn $datum . "\n"; for my $i ( 1 .. $I ) { my $test = join ' ', keys %{ genHash() }; die "test failed after $i iters: $datum vs. $test\n" unless $datum eq $test; } say "Test passed for $I iterations" __END__ C:\test>junk2 c a b d Test passed for 1000000 iterations