You can't "return a hash" from a subroutine, you can only return a list, the effect of return %hash is to flatten the hash into a list of key => value pairs. Thus the effect of the the three following subroutines is similar (the order of the hash keys in the first aside:)

sub foo
{
    my %foo = ( Foo => '1',
                Bar => '2');
    return %foo;
}
                                                                      
+          
sub bar
{
   my @bar = qw(Foo 1 Bar 2);
   return @bar;
}
                                                                      
+          
sub baz
{
   return 'Foo','1','Bar','2';
}
                                                                      
+          
print foo(),"\n";
print bar(),"\n";
print baz(),"\n";
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This is why people are telling you to return a hash reference as this is the only way to retain the, er, hashiness after the appropriate dereferencing.

/J\

Please show working code which does what you're trying to do. When I try the following, it doesn't work:

Q:\>perl -MCGI -le "foreach( keys CGI::Vars() ) { print }"
Type of arg 1 to keys must be hash (not subroutine entry) at -e line 1
+, near ") ) "
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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When I try the following, which the documentation and davidj suggest, it works (in the sense of not being a syntax error). But that works by returning a hash reference:

Q:\>perl -MCGI -le "foreach( keys %{ CGI::Vars() }) { print }"

Q:\>
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