in reply to Questions about using array-of-arrays

You can use Storable::dclone to copy Arrays of Arrays (and other data structures):

use Storable qw(dclone); my @a = ([2, 3], [5, 6]); my $copy_ref = dclone(\@a); my @copy = @{ dclone(\@a) };

(Untested, no perl available atm :()