in reply to Is this a severe error?

It's not an error, it's a warning, as splain can tell you:
$ splain <<< 'Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or strin +g in line 1245' Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string in line 1245 + (#1) (W uninitialized) An undefined value was used as if it were alread +y defined. It was interpreted as a "" or a 0, but maybe it was a mi +stake. To suppress this warning assign a defined value to your variables. To help you figure out what was undefined, perl will try to tell y +ou the name of the variable (if any) that was undefined. In some cases it + cannot do this, so it also tells you what operation you used the undefine +d value in. Note, however, that perl optimizes your program and the opera +tion displayed in the warning may not necessarily appear literally in y +our program. For example, "that $foo" is usually optimized into "that + " . $foo, and the warning will refer to the concatenation (.) operat +or, even though there is no . in your program.

It seems more probable that the warnings came from the print line, as it contains more concatenations than the assignment.

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