Thanks for all the feedback folks.

Zaxo addressed the issue concisely - thanks.

For the other posts that ranted about the logic, I am a bit surprised - first, because it's a bit odd to change the logic of some code to fix a warning, and second, it ignores TMTOWTDI (although the trend in paper tomes on Perl seem to be straying from that mantra).

Anyways, here's the actual code snippet (parsing S-Expr subset):

my $text;
if (($text) = $line =~ m!^\s*\((.*)\)[\r\n]+$!) {
      # keyed value
      my ($key, $val) = split( /\s+/, $text, 2 );
      $val =~ s!(^[\'\"]|[\'\"]$)!!g;
      $info->{$key} = $val;
}
elsif (($text) = $line =~ m!^\s*\'(.*)\'[\r\n]+$!) {
      # quoted value
      $text =~ s!(^[\'\"]|[\'\"]$)!!g;
      return $text;
}
elsif (my ($key) = $line =~ m!^\s*\((\S+)[\r\n]+$!) {
      # sub-level
      push @{$info->{$key} ||= []}, $self->_parse_vm_info( $lines );
}
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And a solution to the warning was never very interesting to me - I had solved it by polluting the enclosing block (as above) and while I liked the single initial def by Zaxo, I chose not to use that because future edits could make the def inadvertently disappear for the 2nd block (a minor annoyance).

Onward, McPerl