Ok, Ok, Liverpole wins, it was his gently embarassing remarks that got me to clean up the error when 'use strict' was added back in the code. Once I worked through all the global and local referencing, the code behaved pretty well. So my syntax was correct, it seems that Perl was getting confused somewhere because of lack of variable definition.

Looks good, thanks again
fc

In reply to Re^4: how to assign hash element value to scalar? by jugdish114
in thread how to assign hash element value to scalar? by jugdish114

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