pack and unpack are your friend if you need to transfer just lists of strings:

my @items = qw(muthuma corion foo);

my $template = '(N/a*)*';

my $packed = pack $template, @ARGV;

print ">>$_<<" for unpack $template, $packed;
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Update: BrowserUk's suggestion of Storable is far better than my idea of pack and unpack, because it handles arbitrary datastructures. Just make sure you use nstore so you are independent of the byte order of the machines.