> Also, I would greatly appreciate any tips on refactoring perl code in general, methodologies or processes that you may have used before to approach it.

here a way to convert ampNotify to allow named parameters without breaking the old positional interface:

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dump qw/pp/;



sub ampNotify {
    my ($who ,$subject ,$severity ,$message , $othercontact ,$path ,$f
+ile) = @_;

    # --- this will use named parameters if first arg is hashref
    if (ref($who) eq "HASH"){
        # - defaults (optional)
        my %defaults = (
            who          => "su_and_it",
            severity     => 3,
            othercontact => "None",
           );

        
          
        my %args = ( %defaults, %$who);

        # - parameter check (optional)
        my @obligatory = qw/subject message path file/;
        for (@obligatory){
            die "missing '$_' argument in ampNotify() " unless exists 
+$args{$_} 
        }

        ($who ,$subject ,$severity ,$message , $othercontact ,$path ,$
+file) =
          @args{qw/who subject severity message  othercontact path fil
+e/};

    }

    # check content
    pp [($who ,$subject ,$severity ,$message , $othercontact ,$path ,$
+file)];

    # --- your orig code following
    # ...
}


# --------- USAGE

my $message= <<"__message__";
Server: SERVER
File:   ORIGFILE
Error: Departments missing from WWMBR_NAMES.TXT
__message__

ampNotify(
    {
        who          => "su_and_it",
        severity     => 3,
        othercontact => "None",
        path         => 'FOO',
        file         => 'BAR',
        subject      => "Error processing 'BAZ' ",
        message      => $message,        
    }
);
[download]

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.