I don't think $$hashvar{key} interpolates correctly as a dereferencer inside double quotes

Seems to work fine here. What happened when you tried it?

$ perl -le '$h = {one=>1}; print "$$h{one}"'
1
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Sorry chaps, I don't follow what you are doing there at all. I'm quite a novice.

If I have:

$$hashRecordPtr{'connection1_size1'}
if I set $count to 3
how can I replace the size1 for size$count and get $$hashRecordPtr{'connection1_size3'} ? Do you see what I'm getting at? I know you do as you are way above me in the perl stakes, I just don't understand your answer, sorry.

Ok. Let's get back to basics then :)

When you look things up in a hash, you use a string as the index. So your first example is the same as:

$index = 'connection1_size1';
$$hashRecordPtr{$index};
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Do you follow that? The hash index is just any string value.

But what we've done there is to now use a variable as the hash index. Which means that we can now be a bit cleverer.

$index = "connection1_size$count";
$$hashRecordPtr{$index};
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So now we have a double-quoted string, and we've used the value of the variable $count within the string.

So that effectively does what you want, but we can cut out the unnecessary $index variable and use the double-quoted string directly as the hash index.

$$hashRecordPtr{"connection1_size$count"};
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Is that any clearer?

--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg