I think he meant to demonstrate that you do not need \$ (or $$) to access the data you have described. However, if you want to create a reference to that single piece of data then you do indeed have to use the prefix \ because that's exactly what that prefix does.

There are also other ways to create references to data, such as {} and []. References are described in perldoc perlref

If this does not answer your question, maybe you need to provide a little more context to help us understand why this does not solve your problem?

I thought your actual question was about a \.

Please note my print statement does not need the \ to work correctly.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding your question. Please provide an actual runnable program that shows a failure when the \ is not used, and success when the \ is used, and we can proceed from there.