This eval-thing???

It's my own work...

I'm a quiet good hobby-programmer with 30 years experience in C/C++. Perl i used first time around 3 years ago. So i'm still learning, but a lot of things (as ie. eval) i know from other languages. So things are quiet easy for me if they are not too specific.

Hi,

Regarding VarsAsHash , the \ operator returns references (see perlop), so \%hash is a reference to a %hash,  my $ref = \%hash; $ref->{key} = 'value';

see perlreftut#Making References , references quick reference, modern_perl_2016_a4.pdf page 56

regarding eval,

classic post on the topic of letting user input create variables in your program, http://perl.plover.com/varvarname.html, varvarname2.html, varvarname3.html

example of letting user-input rewrite your program

#!/usr/bin/perl --
#~ use strict;
#~ use warnings;
use CGI;
my $query = CGI->new( { qw{ a a b b query BANANA s s z z } } );
my @names = $query->param;
for( @names ){
    $val = $query->param($_);
    eval "\$$_ = '$val';";
}
__END__
Can't locate object method "param" via package "BANANA" (perhaps you f
+orgot to load "BANANA"?) at - line 8.
[download]

There is no more CGI object, only BANANA, and that is best case scenario, program stopping,

 $val =~ s/'/\\'/gms; isn't enough to protect against that,

instead of a failing BANANA message it could have easily deleteAllMyFiles() or makeMeSuperuser or randomExploit()

Yes, you could avoid random-code in $_ by removing all except a-z characters

And escape all "dangerous" characters in $val with quotemeta

But then random-input is still able to replace $query or any other variable in the program break it in unexpected ways

Get yourself a copy of chromatics free e?book Modern Perl a loose description of how experienced and effective Perl 5 programmers work....You can learn this too.

See also Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

and maybe PLEAC - Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook

And also Lexical scoping like a fox, Read this if you want to cut your development time in half! and understand that  strict itself confers no benefits; The benefits come from avoidance of the bad practices forbidden by  strict :)

hehe, failing BANANA :D