Perl doesn't impose artificial restrictions on such things as how big a data structure can grow. In fact, it places very few artifical restrictions, period. It might be considered an artifical restriction that the regular expression engine is not re-entrant, but that's a stretch. And there is a warning that gets spit out if you dive too deep into recurision, unless you turn off the warning. That's somewhat contrived. But generally, no you don't have to worry about Perl preventing you from consuming 100% of your memory and swapfile space with gigantic datastructures.

As for storing your hashes, you might also look at using a data serializer such as Storable. But in the immediate, your problem seems to have already been solved by remembering not to expect lexicals to behave like package globals.

---

---

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.