Thanks Zaxo!!!

I was under the impression that args are sent as values through @_ and thought that this problem was something to do with closures. I went back and tried a chomp on simple sub and the same happened. I checked perldoc perlsub and i got this info

Any arguments passed in show up in the array @_.  Therefore, if you ca
+lled a function with two arguments, those would be stored in $_[0] an
+d $_[1].  The array @_ is a local array, but its elements are aliases
+ for the actual scalar parameters.  In particular, if an element $_[0
+] is updated, the corresponding argument is updated (or an error occu
+rs if it is not updatable).
[download]

Now it is clear to me!

thanks again!

cheers

SK