I saw that in the docs but it did not explain what it was, but it says this:

Starting with Perl 5.14, unshift can take a scalar EXPR, which must hold a reference to an unblessed array. The argument will be dereferenced automatically. This aspect of unshift is considered highly experimental. The exact behaviour may change in a future version of Perl.

But that is a winner, it works.

In reply to Re^2: unshift single scalar by Bodger
in thread unshift single scalar by Bodger

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