Wow!

Thanks for these comments. I could sense that my "action at a distance" solution was probably not kosher, and I really like how you call an anonymous function in twig_roots and assign to the array from there. Really, thanks to both of you for commenting. I took the advice from your colleague below and updated my post with a link to a sample data file that is downloadable without registering, downloaded perltidy, ran my code through it, and reposted that, and added a snippet of data from one of the files I am parsing.

Much thanks to both of you.