You fill your hash: 
%words = qw     (

                fred    camel
                barney  llama
                betty   alpaca
                wilma   alpaca

                );

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It now contains four elements with the names of famous actors as keys.

If the user enters one of the keys, everything will be fine, because e.g. $words{fred} is defined, so $secretword will get the value 'camel'.
If the user enters something, that is not in the list of keys, e.g. 'busunsl', then $words{busunsl} is not defined.
And $secretword will become undef.

And you check for an undef value with defined.

You wanted to fill something into $secretword if there was nothing in it, that is, if it is undef.
So your if-statement has to be: if (! defined $secretword) { With the ! meaning 'not'.

In reply to Re: Re: Uninitialized value ? by busunsl
in thread Uninitialized value ? by All0uette

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