Yes, I've done it that way, with a %thr hash, and it works like you suggest. But it only works from the main program. What I'm eventually aiming at is to print to the other threads from a thread. When I try to use threads::shared on @clients or %thrs, and try to access them from each thread, each thread dosn't see a thread created after it was created. But each thread will return the same list if I call threads->list. But here's the gotcha, the list returned in each thread from threads->list, is of the form in @thrs , which presents the same dereferencing problem, which I'm asking. I hope I made sense.