Using the sdk for perl I can retrieve info about, among other things, snapshots of the virtual machines hosted on the vmware platform.

I am having trouble returning the right thing from one subroutine to the other.

sub _remove_snap {
    my ( $vm ) = @_;

    # skip if no snapshots on vm
    unless ( defined $vm->snapshot ) {
        print $vm->name . " has no snapshots, skipping\n";
        return;
    }
    my $snaps = _find_snapname( $vm->snapshot->currentSnapshot,
        $vm->snapshot->rootSnapshotList );

    print Dumper $snaps;
}

sub _find_snapname {
    my ( $ref, $tree ) = @_;
    my $counter = 0;
    my @snaps;
    foreach my $node (@$tree) {
#        print $node->name, "\t" . $node->createTime . "\n";
        if ( $node->name eq $snapname ) {
            push @snaps, $node
        }
        _find_snapname( $ref, $node->childSnapshotList );
    }

    print Dumper @snaps;
    return \@snaps;
}
[download]

This code returns this:

$VAR1 = bless( {
                 'createTime' => '2017-12-07T21:10:30.643627Z',
                 'name' => '2',
                 'state' => bless( {
                                     'val' => 'poweredOff'
                                   }, 'VirtualMachinePowerState' ),
                 'description' => '',
                 'id' => '42',
                 'snapshot' => bless( {
                                        'type' => 'VirtualMachineSnaps
+hot',
                                        'value' => '38-snapshot-42'
                                      }, 'ManagedObjectReference' ),
                 'vm' => bless( {
                                  'value' => '38',
                                  'type' => 'VirtualMachine'
                                }, 'ManagedObjectReference' ),
                 'childSnapshotList' => [
                                          bless( {
                                                   'snapshot' => bless
+( {
                                                                      
+    'type' => 'VirtualMachineSnapshot',
                                                                      
+    'value' => '38-snapshot-43'
                                                                      
+  }, 'ManagedObjectReference' ),
                                                   'vm' => bless( {
                                                                    'v
+alue' => '38',
                                                                    't
+ype' => 'VirtualMachine'
                                                                  }, '
+ManagedObjectReference' ),
                                                   'replaySupported' =
+> '0',
                                                   'quiesced' => '0',
                                                   'state' => bless( {
                                                                      
+ 'val' => 'poweredOff'
                                                                     }
+, 'VirtualMachinePowerState' ),
                                                   'name' => '3',
                                                   'createTime' => '20
+17-12-07T21:11:45.892562Z',
                                                   'id' => '43',
                                                   'description' => ''
                                                 }, 'VirtualMachineSna
+pshotTree' )
                                        ],
                 'quiesced' => '0',
                 'replaySupported' => '0'
               }, 'VirtualMachineSnapshotTree' );
$VAR1 = [];
[download]

The first $VAR1 is from _find_snapname() and the second (empty array ref) from _remove_snap(). I don't understand why the second one is empty, I must be missing something very obvious ...