I have to agree that sometimes the warnings do not make a lot of sense to me. I think my "favorite" is "Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string" given how often I have seen it in places I didn't even think I was concatenating anything. Still, I always try and eliminate all of the warnings since it means I am either doing something I did not intend to do or perl is doing something I didn't expect. And in the latter case I get to learn more about the intricacies of the language and/or the interpreter. I am sad to see you got some negative votes on your post though because on the surface it does look puzzling.