Can i first of all just ask why you are trying to pass arguments to a method this way.

Im not sure if i have the whole picture here, maybe you have code afterwards for some special reason, BUT
Can you not just call your subroutine the most obvious way using just the name and pass in the argument.

use strict;
my $text='abcdefgijkl';
test($text);

sub test
{
    print "\nokey!";
}
[download]

I may have it wrong though.
MonkPaul.