in reply to Initializing Hash reference

Come on, DON'T create a new thread for every tiny aspect of your problem! You won't get better responses if you hide the context of your problem over and over again. You opened at least five other threads just for THIS part of your problem: executing hash element as command, reading commands from configuration file, How to read hash of .cfg file, Useless use of private variable, Reading .cfg file. And you did the same for any other part of your problem: Environment variables, testing for undef, getopt, reading directories, capturing program output, XML; often clearly showing that you did not even spend one second searching the documentation. You were told several times to read the documentation and to stay in one thread. You are wasting our resources.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)