I have now established what I wish to accomplish! the input to the initial call of get SNMP will always be the same, and IP. What I want the sub to do is then call itself with different arguments and behave in a certain manner. That manner being to first get the list of interfaces, and say map them to a hash, then get the interface MAC addresses and place them as the values. My eventual goal is to have the type of device determined as well so that get_snmp will know to use different OIDs for different hardware... Different vendors put their values in different places