tada, it looks like it is $2 that is being passed!

That was a long shot! There is (or was?) a bug in perl, so that $2 was not properly bound, and would evaluate to undef if first evaluated outside the scope of the regex that set it. (And passing to a function did not, for the purposes of this bug, count as "evaluating" it.)

I guess this is the bug that bit you. It is an easy bug to work around. All you need is to assign some dummy variable my $dummy = $2. Or maybe you could even get around it by passing "$2" instead of $2 to the function. I don't remember the details.

The Sidhekin
print "Just another Perl ${\(trickster and hacker)},"