you could, if you were sufficiently perverse, do this (without affecting @ARGV in the calling context)...

One thing to bear in mind doing that is that shift inside the subroutine will still act on @_, and will not magically transfer it's allegiance to @ARGV.

$ perl -le '
> sub x
> {
>     local @ARGV = @_;
>     print while $_ = shift;
>     print qq{->@ARGV<-};
>     print qq{->@_<-};
> }
> 
> x( qw{ 1 2 3 } );
> print while $_ = shift;' a b c
1
2
3
->1 2 3<-
-><-
a
b
c
$
[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG