You experienced the same confusion that I did! I thought I was copying the array correctly (based on some perldocs examples). I added some additional debug code and determined that the program calling my subroutine is extremely picky in terms of the format that I return. In fact, my best option was to create and return a long string for each display line from the referenced hashes. Thanks for everyone's help; knowing I was copying / referencing correctly allowed me to focus on other areas of the code and catch the real problem.