Hi ExReg,

You may want to have a look at perlcritic, which can be helpful in catching some potential issues in addition to strict and warnings. For example, in this case it would have issued a warning 'Magic variable "$%" should be assigned as "local"' in regards to the %% hash (its analysis is not perfect but in this case at least it gives a hint), and a warning 'Capture variable used outside conditional', which stevieb already correctly pointed out. If you run perlcritic --verbose 10 ..., you will get a brief explanation of the issue as well. perlreftut and perlref are also good sources of information on references.

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D