Apologies. Of course my production code does something like this:

my $self = {
    user_name  => 'fubar',
    num_days   => 0,
};

bless ($self, $class);
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I threw the tom/dick/harry example together from memory. I wanted to emphasize that I was defining 3 classes in the same file - something that other OO languages do not like.

If it works in the .pm, it'll work in the .pl. Another error must have been introduced.

Ikegami - I think you got it - but with one exception:

You have to include shebang (#!/usr/bin/perl) at the top of a .pl, but not at the top of a .pm file.

I took my working .pm file and tried to get it to work as a .pl and it threw errors. But I did not notice the error messages were BASH error messages instead of Perl messages. (duh)

I put shebang at the top of the script - and now it actually works. Thanks Monks!