strange-- I was doing that. I tried to recreate the code on my home computer and it worked as you all said (and as I originally expected it to). I'm guessing either

a) my work has a weird version of perl
b) the larger code I'm working on has some strange options set

Thanks for all your help.

In reply to Re^2: creating defined references to arrays of size zero by spieper
in thread creating defined references to arrays of size zero by spieper

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