Excellent suggestion, wonder why I never thought of using a case statement in a perl script..
All of this is academic at point as I disabled the strict refs as per the first suggestion and now my script is working as required/expected. The reason I felt it necessary to do this in the first place is to allow my monitoring system to run external commands against multiple pre-defined hosts in attempts to "self-heal" certain problems.
Once again, thank you everyone for your input and suggestions.