I also have tried getting rid of the @{} so the returned value is a single array which also worked, however I will be needing a "list of lists" later on in my script, so I need to use the \ reference.
PS: I have read the ‘perldsc’ a number of times but I guess that I am a bit of a slow ‘Scribe’ and there were no examples on referencing on this tutorial. However, amongst your replies, I have enough articles to go on and improve my Perl techniques.