Just a couple of extra things to add to the replies; the tutorial section of this site has some good articles about references of particular use might be the "References quick reference" by tye and it maybe easier (to understand at least) if you copy off the array to a proper array, so:-

my @array = @{$config->{bids}{itemcode}};
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Doing it this way seems to be a bit slower in perl (why?) but would allow you to use simpler looking code later in the function i.e.

$size = @array;

or

foreach (@array){
...
}
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