No there's only one (nested) hash. %test To print a hash for debugging: print "@{%hash}\n"; from that you'll get back references to the contained hashes, so really you want to loop through the hash keys foreach my $key (keys %test) { my $ref = $test{$key}; } to get the references $ref, then dereference that foreach my $nextkey (keys %$ref) { my $nextref = $test{$key}{nextkey}; } As you know the depth of hashing you can avoid using the ref() function to determine if a reference or a scalar vale has been returned by $test{$key}.