If you're going to create a function to get/set this variable, do something like:

my $var = 0;
sub get_var {
    return $var;
}

sub set_var {
    my ($new_val) = @_;

    # Do some checks on $new_val here.

    $var = $new_val;
    return $var;
}
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The reason you have it scoped with my is to keep it protected as much as possible from accidental clobbering.

(Of course, you could just put yourself into that namespace, but that's just being silly.)

If you're going to have subs to return and set values, I like to combine them:

my $oui_lookup;

sub oui_lookup {
    my $newval = shift;

    # validation, if necessary

    if ( defined $newval ) {
        $oui_lookup = $newval;
    }
    $oui_lookup;
}
[download]

If it's exported to your main namespace, you can use it as follows:

my $old_lookup = oui_lookup();
my $new_lookup = oui_lookup( $some_new_val );
[download]

Admittedly, having separate subs can be cleaner, so some may object to my way of doing it.

Cheers,
Ovid

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