Thanks All, anon was right--it was a dumb scoping problem. And I'm red faced about the lack of quotes around HASH--I promise not to post questions again when I'm sleepy. Bloodnok: this is very cool: 
foreach (@{ ref $hr eq q/HASH/ ? [ $hr ] : $hr })

[download]
I'd been wracking my brains for a way to do that as well :-)

In reply to Re^2: Pushing a hashref into an array by rastoboy
in thread Pushing a hashref into an array by rastoboy

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