I see where your C/C++ influence gets you a variable called gptr, but in Perl there are no pointers. A better name is gref. So, to elaborate on Tanktalus's reply a little: Perl variables are reference counted and garbage collected, so when you reference %hsh with $gref Perl bumps the reference count on %hsh. %hsh was created with a reference count of 1 and the count is decremented when %hsh goes out of scope. However by the time %hsh goes out of scope the reference count has been incremented due to the reference assignment to $gref so the storage remains in use until $gref either goes out of scope or is assigned a new value.

For the vast majority of Perl scripts you needn't be concerned about memory management and that significant bane of C, invalid memory accesses, essentially can't happen.