robinbowes,

my ($one, $two, $three) = qw(1 2 3);   # works with warnings and stric
+tures
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You are of course correct about unpack returning the correct number of values. I am a novice in that regard, so I leave the style up to you.

Auto-vivication is the action by which a hash key that didn't previously exist gets created. This may or may not be intentional. Consider:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %hash;

print "wow\n" if $hash{foo}{bar};
print $_, $/ for keys %hash;
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Just by testing if the second level key 'bar' was true, 'foo' was automatically created. In the example code that I gave you, the hash keys were being auto-vivified intentionally in a hash slice. Sometimes it can be unintentional.

Cheers - L~R