Can't shed all that much light on the issue, but I can point out the following from ARGV in perlvar:

ARGV

The special filehandle that iterates over command-line filenames in @ARGV . Usually written as the null filehandle in the angle operator <> . Note that currently ARGV only has its magical effect within the <> operator; elsewhere it is just a plain filehandle corresponding to the last file opened by <> . In particular, passing \*ARGV as a parameter to a function that expects a filehandle may not cause your function to automatically read the contents of all the files in @ARGV .

ARGV: It's more than just an array!

Update: And if you really want to do what you appear to want to do, running this script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

package foo;

sub fake_ARGV { print "in foo::ARGV\n" }
no warnings "once";
*foo::ARGV = *foo::fake_ARGV;

package main;

foo->ARGV;
print $ARGV[0];
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does this:

~/sandbox$ perl test.pl 'Still here'
in foo::ARGV
Still here
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