This:

use vars qw( $foo );
$foo = 1;
[download]

And this:

our $foo = 1;
[download]

Do the exact same thing. Though, "our" may not be available to you in Perl 5.005.

They don't do the same thing when you put curly braces around them. Be careful with your word "same" there.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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update: Since I managed to confuse a few people in the CB just now, let me add this:

our is a lexical-scoped aliasing of package variable (in the current package), while use vars is a package-scoped relaxation of the normal use strict rules. You cannot universally swap one for the other: they have overlapping uses and meanings, but also distinct uses and meanings.