This will work. the innermost key will point to an empty hashref.

Except it will clobber already existing keys/subhashes.

my @list=qw(a b c d e f g);

my %hash;
my $hptr=\%hash;
$hptr = $hptr->{$_}||={} foreach @list;
[download]

Change that assignment to ||= and it works fine. :-)

---
demerphq

_{<Elian> And I do take a kind of perverse pleasure in having an OO assembly language...}