Not entirely, but well spotted.

I cannot recall full rationale for that old 'unusual' coding, but may have to revisit it all again ... but under complex test conditions since it sits at hub of mission critical stuff.

The return & other vars have module scope, probably to share with internal subs, and where the external subs have a standardised layout. I see svhash() only calls 1 internal and so may not need module scoping of vars so often! 

package DB::DBctrl; 
#use strict;     
our @EXPORT_OK = qw(svhash svdb mvdbsub mvdbhead);# externals   
my ($dbhandx, $fail, etc, ...) = ("","", etc, ...);
sub svhash {    

  return ($dbhandx, $fail);    

}

[download]

I think I would have interspersed compilations to the test stage where final 'use strict'-miscompile only due to the ("BerkeleyDB::HASH" etc) barewords it couldn't handle. But the exact ramifications escape me at the moment.

However, even module scope for a returned ref is starting to give me the jitters ... thanks very much ...

In reply to Re^4: untie tied hash fails mysteriously by Pstack
in thread untie tied hash fails mysteriously by Pstack

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