Just a comment. BTW I agree with the above comments that you whould avoid globals <e>especially</e> in long scripts.

But as and aside regarding use vars and  our declarations. I don't believe they are quite equivalent. This might be splitting hairs, but a use vars declaration gives a package variable while an our declaration gives a global disguised as a my variable. This means the scoping is lexical for our variables. The following code

&decl();
print $variable;
sub decl {
    our $variable = 1;
}
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would not compile under strict. $variable is out of scope by the print statement. A use vars qw($variable); line would work however.

Another implication, if you are using packages to give different name spaces in the same file, a declaration like...

package one;
use vars qw($thing1);
our $thing2;
#stuff;
package main;
print "$thing1 and $thing2";
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might not do what you expect. For example not run under strict. The vars variable $thing1 is a package variable, not available to the main package without a $one::thing1 type address. $thing2 however, the our declaration <e>is</e> available to the main package. It's scope is the same as my so is file wide in this sample.

I didn't get this when I first started using <cod>our</code> so I just wanted to throw it there since it seems to apply to this thread.

Ira,

"So... What do all these little arrows mean?"
~unknown