I've having difficulty with a hash of arrays. I'm creating a dropdown menu system with headers a b .. z under each letter is are menuItems beginning with a b .. z. my structure looks like this; 
       my @menu_bar_names = qw ( aMenu bMenu ... );
       my @MenuItems="";
       my %aMenu = { label => "  A",
                     MenuItems => [ @MenuItems ] };
       my %bMenu = { label => "  B",
                     MenuItems => [ @MenuItems ] };
       my %cMenu = { label => "  C",
                      MenuItems => [ @MenuItems ] };

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I used the following to populate each MenuItem array. 
   foreach my $app (@sorted_applications) {
      $app = lc $app;
      if ( "$app" lt "b" ) {
         push  ( @{ $aMenu{MenuItems} }, $app);
         next;
      } elsif ($app lt "c" ) {
         push  (@{ $bMenu{MenuItems} },$app);
         next;
...

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And the following to print the first element. 
         print " @{$aMenu{MenuItems}}[0]\n";

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I would like to avoid using $aMenu in the printing and use something like, $abc_menu instead of hard coding $aMenu, $bMenu such as; 
foreach my $abc_menu (@menu_bar_names) {
         print " @{$abc_menu{MenuItems}}[0]\n";
}

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but I get the following error. 'Global symbol "abc_menu"; requires explicit package name at...' The error makes sense and I understand why I get it. But I haven't figured out how to get around it. I'm sure it's something simple but I've read so much I've confused myself. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

In reply to Hashes of Arrays by plmc

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