Surely one can ask a perl question without code

One can ask anything, but don't expect a useful answer.

perhaps people will be less inclined to bitch about the code and mode inclined to answer the perl question then.

There is a reason why we bitch about your code, and that is very simply that it contains many pitfalls that we have seen very often, and that can easily be avoided, and we don't want to debug it all over again. In the end one of your problems turned out to be a scoping error, which use strict; catches. See the point?

It's a bit like when somebody can't even add numbers properly, and asks why his numerical integration fails. There's no merit in explaining to him why it fails before he has the foundation to work properly with it.

If you don't accept that, go find somebody who fixes your code for money, instead of pissing off those people who might answer you for free if you showed some more effort, and actually took the advice you were given.