Use strict is your friend! Once you got to know it ;-)

You have to declare every variable you use in your script, normally you do this with my. So you'd write, e.g.:

my %words;
%words = (...);

# or you can do the initialisation right away
my %words = (...);

# the same goes for the other variables
my $name = <>;
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The other ways to 'declare' variables are with our and local and use vars. dominus has two excellent articles about this topic:

• Coping with Scoping
• Seven Useful Uses of local
• And there is a bunch of other interesting articles on his site but some are quite advanced so you should just bookmark this for later ...

-- Hofmator