You seem to confuse arrays with references to arrays (short arrayrefs). Reading perlreftut, perllol (lists of lists) and perldsc should clear up things.

For example:

my @row = $bigarray[$count];
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doesn't do what you want. Since $bigarry[$count] returns an arrayref, @row will contain only one value (that is, the reference). You'll probably want this instead:

my @row = @{$bigarray[$count]};
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