Whoops!
You're right, that '...->{"defline"}->[$y]' shouldn't be there, I didn't notice that. But I just wonder why Perl complains about a misused ARRAY-ref in the previous 'if'-statement and not in the faulty 'elsif'-line...?

=> I just tested the old subroutine with the buggy code and corrected it like you proposed and...it works.
Very confusing that Perl reports an error a few lines up and not for the buggy line itself... ;-)
Thanx for clarifying my daily Perl-nebulae a bit!! :-)

Cheers, Micha