in reply to array of arrays - context problem

Anonymous Monk,
As has already been indicated, the way to create a master array is my @master = (@array1, @array2, @array3); With that said, if the only reason you are doing that is so that you can loop over all 3, then the following works just fine:
my (@array1, @array2, @array3); # defined elsewhere for ( @array1, @array2, @array3 ) { # do something with $_ }

Cheers - L~R