The other answers so far have addressed your actual problem. I'd like to add a comment on your "validate.pm".

You start it with a shebang line, which is an odd thing to do since it is not actually executed (nor will any flags such as -w be parsed from the line by perl).

Usually (but only optionally) a module will declare its own name space and only export to the use'ing code subs that are requested:

in MyModule.pm: 

package MyModule;
use Exporter ();
our @ISA = 'Exporter';
our @EXPORT_OK = qw/foo bar/;
sub foo { "do some foo stuff" }
sub bar { "do some bar stuff" }
1; # not actually needed since @EXPORT_OK= evaluates as true

[download]
and in the calling code: 
use MyModule 'foo';
&foo();

[download]
You might take a look at perlmod.pod for more info on creating modules.

One last comment: one-level all-lowercase names like "validate" are usually for pragmas and are reserved for use by perl5-porters.

In reply to Re: Using a subroutine as a module by ysth
in thread Using a subroutine as a module by bradcathey

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