At risk of missing the point of the question you're asking - have you had a look at the module 'Exporter'? It's ... well, it's basically geared up to exporting (and importing) variables from modules.

Anyway, that aside - the reason you get those to errors, is because the module 'runs' when you import it. The print statements on like 63 and 75 aren't encapsulated within a subroutine, so they run at the same time as you import the module - which is before the 'init' subroutine is called.

You will get the same error with a blank script that just has the 'use' lines in it, I think.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

package testfish;

sub sub_to_do_something
{
  print "Doing something \n";
}

print "FISH\n";
1;
[download]

And script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use testfish;

print "Not done anything with the module yet\n";
&testfish::sub_to_do_something();
[download]

Gives an output of:

FISH
Not done anything with the module yet
Doing something
[download]

Which is more or less the same as you're doing with that 'print' line in your modules. Init hasn't been called yet. (I assume it's something that CLI::Framework requires and uses later).