Ronnie, you've stumbled onto one of the darker corners of Perl, the difference between lexical (my) variables and package/global (our, local) variables. The critical expression here is:

  while (($key,$value) = each %$DB_name) {
[download]

This code attempts to use $DB_name as a symbolic-reference to find the hash to be indexed. Strict-mode forbids symbolic-references because they don't work with lexical (my) variables. When you turn off strict you get the package variable %IWSTEST (or whatever is in $DB_name) which doesn't exist since you declared your hashes with my().

Ok, so now you know what the problem is, how should you solve it? Here are two options:

• Declare your variables with our() or use vars which will make them package variables accessible by symbolic references.
• Access your variables with a real, non-symbolic reference based on the command-line argument. For example:

     my %name_to_hash = (
        ISWTEST => \%ISWTEST,
        ISWLIVE => \%ISWLIVE,
        #...);
     while (($key,$value) = each %{$name_to_hash{$DB_name}}) {
        #...
  [download]

Give it a try and post a new question if you're still having trouble.

-sam

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