Thank you for your ideas. I realize that I could keep the variable in an outer scope, but what I was trying to do was preallocate space without having it filled up with undefs, so I could use push on the array. My example code should have included a loop like the following inside the subroutine after the "Push stuff on the array here" comment: 
for (1..5000) {
  push @array,$_;
}

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In reply to Re: array pre-allocation trick by Anonymous Monk
in thread array pre-allocation trick by Anonymous Monk

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