Hi, I have just begun to use subroutines for my scripts and I have stumbled across the following :

In the following code I declared the $variable input via my in a while() loop. Now I want to access this variable in the "outer" block without having to declare it globally. So that it's just available to the "input" subroutine. How can I accomplish this? 
sub input
{
    while ( 1 ) 
    {
        my $input = <STDIN>;
        chomp ( $input );

        if ( $input !~ /\d/ ) 
        {
            print "ILLEGAL INPUT\n";
            next;
        }
    
        last;
    }

    return $input;
}

[download]
Thanks for your help

In reply to my() troubles by Anonymous Monk

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