Remember the three commandments of the Perl religion:

   use warnings;
   use strict;
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Did I say three commandments? Yes, the third one is

   use diagnostics;
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when you're stumped with a message perl throws at you. In your case, with use diagnostics enabled, you'll get

    Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated 
    at ./t line 7 (#1)
    (D deprecated) It makes a lot of work for the 
    compiler when you clobber a subroutine's argument 
    list, so it's better if you assign the results
    of a split() explicitly to an array (or list).
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So ... just assign the list returned by split() to an array, and the warning goes away.

-- saintmike