Hello Monks It's been a long time since I perl'ed! I have a program I wrote a few years back and I did all the bad things, global variables, variables with no initialization etc. (I was just learning at the time) So I have decided to re-write it, remove all global vars and make sure that use warnings,strict and diagnostics are happy. If there is more I should do to make perl happy, I am all ears. To my real question. In my 'main' program I have made some local hash tables that i am using to store and control the program and it's data. The thing that beat me up for an hour or two was 'scope' I believe I have a decent handle on it now, but am still struggling a little with implementation. Here's an example snippet. 
# call the sub with a local hash
play_around(\%toys);

sub play_around {
  my %t = %{$_[0]}; 
# I found this the only way to get the has in properly,
# otherwise it came in scalar, and mixing and matching 
# hash and scalars made me choose to load this way, if 
# it's wrong, please correct me.

$t{'leggo'} = "yes"; 
# this only lasts locally in this sub

$_[0]{'leggo'} = "yes"; 
# this will modify the actual %toys which is what I want.
# But this is darned ugly! and with a number of 
# hashes / scalars it's a pain. Is there not a better 
# way, or have I crossed the line into being a 
# bad practice perl programmer?
}

[download]
Thank you in advance for any insight to my non-grasping of pointer/var handling in perl. I'm used to C and don't have too much trouble there!

In reply to passing of variables by itsscott

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