The first example will work, but as chipmunk says, you should use a reference if you are passing one or more arrays\hashes to a sub, otherwise it gets very difficult. Consider this:

my @fruit = ('apples', 'pears', 'bananas');
my @drinks = ('cola', 'lemonade', 'water');

foo(@fruit,@drinks);
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This is not a big problem if the number of entities in @fruit and @drinks is always the same, but suppose there are different amounts of fruit or drinks each time the script runs?

With a reference you can do this:

foo(\@fruit,\@drinks);

sub foo {
   my ($fruit,$drinks) = @_;

   print $fruit->[0], "\n";
   print $drinks->[0], "\n";

}
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This will print:
apples
cola

References are really useful but a bit daunting at first. Check perlref documentation and dive in and see what happens.

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