jethro (above) solved my problem: I was expecting behavior from one of my functions that no longer was the case...

Of course I am using strict and warnings. Second thing I type in any Perl file. (After the #! line.) ;)

I had actually played with that: sending the different references to Data::Dumper and seeing what I got. (As well as trying different variations on the dereferencing, and seeing what works.) The dereference string above correctly dereferences to a method in an object stored in a two-dimensional array in a hash.

The code above now works, now that I've got _parse_args() able to parse it's own output again. (Which means find_message_info() is working correctly, which it wasn't.)