You're running into scoping issues. The easiest thing I've found is to pass a hashref as the second argument. The args get stuck in there. For instance:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;

{
    my %opts = ();
    getopts( 'w:h:', \%opts );
    print "w: $opts{w}; h: $opts{h}\n";
}
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Running like:

 $ perl opts.pl -w wassup -h hey
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Produces:

w: wassup; h: hey
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Chris
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