Hello sbrothy, and welcome to the Monastery!

To expand on dave_the_m’s answer:

Step 4 of the Basic debugging checklist says: “Dump arrays, hashes and arbitrarily complex data structures.” Using the core Data::Dumper module to print out the contents of @array, we see that after the first push the array contains 4 elements, which Data::Dumper names $VAR1 to $VAR4:

$VAR1 = 'CLIENT_PATH';
$VAR2 = 'PATH: 0';
$VAR3 = 'CLIENT_NICK';
$VAR4 = 'NICK: 0';
[download]

That’s because push puts its argument(s) (following the destination array) into list context, and a hash in list context returns a list of the form (key-x, val-x, key-y, val-y, ...). But when a reference to the hash is pushed instead, the result of the first push is:

$VAR1 = {
          'CLIENT_PATH' => 'PATH: 0',
          'CLIENT_NICK' => 'NICK: 0'
        };
[download]

— which shows that only one element ($VAR1) has been pushed onto the array; and this time its referent retains its identity as a hash.

Some useful reading: perlreftut and perldsc.

Hope that helps,