No I'm not. I did see lots on the Net about it. The annoying thing is that I'm using strict and even when I purposely dereference something that is not a reference I don't get a strict error - i.e. my %hash = (); $hash{key} = $value; print $$hash{key} does not give me an error saying the hash is not defined I get the dereferencing error but I get this error when I have got everything working and then I put in a print statement. Do you know how I can avoid this error when using references?