Whooohooo!! It is working.

For those of you who are keeping score, here is the final code, and what changes had to be made.

First, $foo->bar('$blah') puts "$blah" in bar, not the value of $blah. Whoops, stupid mistake.

%Unique_SN holds the unique serial number as the key and a pointer to the DEVICE struct associated with it as its value.

I can now 'use strict' agian, and I don't have to use the itermediate $sn. Now to finish this thing. I might be able to dump %Unique_DeviceType, but I'm holding on to it for now.

Thanks all. I think the orignal was not working because of the $$sn->datetime($datetime) line, not because of the $$sn = new DEVICE line. The failure was, I think, in not dereferencing. It didn't care about the anon $$sn, but $$sn was literally holding a memory address.

Wait... I think I may have just confused myself. Anyway, it is working, so no need to worry with it. I like this way better.

#!c:\perl\bin\

use strict;                            #must find way to use deref in 
+my statement
use File::DosGlob 'glob';
use Class::Struct;
use Getopt::Std;
use vars qw($opt_a);

getopts('a:');

my $logPath = "\\\\" . $opt_a . "\\d\$\\iims\\history";

print "Searching $logPath\n";

struct ( DEVICE => { datetime => '$', devicetype => '$', zip => '$', v
+ersion => '$'});

my %Unique_DeviceType;
my %Unique_SN;

foreach my $logfile (glob("$logPath\\*")){
    open (LOG, "<$logfile") or die "Can't open $logfile:  $!";
    while(<LOG>){
        chomp;                                                    #pul
+l off newline
        s/^\s+//;                                                #pull
+ out leading whitespace
        s/\s+$//;                                                #pull
+ out trailing whitespace
        s/\s*,\s*/,/g;                                            #pul
+l out whitespace around commas
        s/\[|\]//g;                                                #re
+move [ ] around date time stamp
        next unless length;                                        #mo
+ve to the next line unless there is something left in this one
        my @entry = split(/,/, $_);                                #sp
+lit entry:  Date Time DeviceType SN ZIP Version

        my @date = split(/:/, $entry[0]);                        #crea
+te datetime  YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
        my @time = split(/:/, $entry[1]);
        my $datetime = $date[2] . $date[1] . $date[0] . $time[0] . $ti
+me[1] . $time[2];

        $Unique_DeviceType{$entry[2]}++;                        #Add e
+ntry to unique list of Device Types

        if (!exists $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}) {                    #If th
+is is first occurance
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]} = new DEVICE;                    #Ad
+d entry to unique list of SNs
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->datetime($datetime);
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->devicetype($entry[2]);
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->zip($entry[4]);
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->version($entry[5]);
        }
        elsif ($datetime > $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->datetime) {    #If t
+his occurance is newer
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->datetime($datetime);
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->zip($entry[4]);
            $Unique_SN{$entry[3]}->version($entry[5]);
        }
    }        
}

foreach my $key (keys(%Unique_SN)){
    print $key . "\n";
}
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