But that way you lose the old value. I'm not sure that that's really what you want:

#!perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
my $foo = 'bar';
$foo = \$foo;

print $foo;
print $$foo;
print Dumper $foo;

__END__

REF(0x12da554)
REF(0x12da554)
$VAR1 = \$VAR1;

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In reply to Re^3: unreachable memory with a non-zero reference count by Corion
in thread unreachable memory with a non-zero reference count by Pickwick

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