I did see that posting, but it doesn't answer my question. If you notice in my post I have given two examples of the offensive line, one of which works, and the other doesn't. Both are making assignments to something on the left side, but one causes an error, and the other doesn't.

My question asks why the two are different, because it doesn't make any sense to me.

I tried using the use warnings; and use diagnostics in my script (I already had -w), but the output results didn't give any more significant information that I could use. If I use the line that is commented out, #print_debug(Dumper $var_ref); I get a full printout showing all the variables to be quite defined!

ryddler