You misunderstood. I'm not trying to assign the array to a ref. I already have a ref. The array is just a place holder to take elements from the original array ref so we can string them together. (See my more extended code in the first response above).

What I'm doing with $count = @array is just get a count of the elements in @array after we stick them in there. That's what I want.

And I've examined $count and it equals n, the number of elements, which is exactly what I want. A number.