I think you really need to show us the code that builds @icpList. Without it we're just guessing (or debugging by telepathy - which really gives me a headache!)

well, all of this started when i decided to use a new module to generate some XML. i put XML::Mini::Document and it began to mess around with everything lol.

sub genIcpList($){
    my @icpList;
    my $fn = $_[0];
    my $xp = XML::XPath->new(filename => $fn);
    my $ip;
    #specify what we are looking for...
    my $nodeset = $xp->find('/AutomationInformation/NodeList/Node/IPAd
+dress'); # find all IP's
    #foreach instance of '/AutomationInformation/NodeList/Node/IPAddre
+ss', add it to the array
    foreach my $node ($nodeset->get_nodelist) {
        $ip = substr(XML::XPath::XMLParser::as_string($node), 11, -12)
+;    
        @icpList = (@icpList, $ip);
    }
    #return the array to main
    return @icpList;
}
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this recieves an xml file and looks for every occurance of a tag and then places the content into an array.