This is one of the interesting things in perl. When I 1st started with perl I was weirded out by this quirk. Pretty much you need to pass by reference, then deference it.

return @ary1, @ary2, @ary3; becomes: return \@ary1, \@ary2, \@ary3.

Dereference:

my @aryref = &retary;
print ${$aryref[0]}[0];    #print 1st element of 1st array
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As an alternate method to return non order dependent data consider using a hash:

my %hash;
$hash{ary1} = @ary1;
$hash{ary2} = @ary2;
$hash{ary3} = @ary3;
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I've started return and receiving hashes in my subrou.. ahem, methods, as you now dont have to worry about the order in which you call them..

As a slight aside Data::Dumper is invaluable when you get the dereferencing blues with complex data structures:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my @aoh;
$aoh[0] = { key => 'value'};
print Dumper(@aoh);
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HTH's!