#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %t=qw( a A b B c C d D e E f F );

print Dumper \%t;

print "***************\n"
[download]

Then I found something really weird : on a machine (Linux Mandrake 9.2), the order of %t is different each time you run the script. BUT on two other machine running RedHat 8.0 and RedHat ES 4, the hash is exactly the same every time!

Then I modified slightly the script :

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %t=qw( a A b B c C d D e E f F );

my %l=%t;

print Dumper \%t;

print Dumper \%l;


print "***************\n"
[download]

There it goes worse : ont the Mandrake machine, the two hashes %t and %l come sometimes in the same order, but not always :

$VAR1 = {
          'c' => 'C',
          'e' => 'E',
          'd' => 'D',
          'a' => 'A',
          'f' => 'F',
          'b' => 'B'
        };
$VAR1 = {
          'c' => 'C',
          'e' => 'E',
          'd' => 'D',
          'a' => 'A',
          'f' => 'F',
          'b' => 'B'
        };
***************
$VAR1 = {
          'd' => 'D',
          'a' => 'A',
          'f' => 'F',
          'c' => 'C',
          'b' => 'B',
          'e' => 'E'
        };
$VAR1 = {
          'a' => 'A',
          'd' => 'D',
          'f' => 'F',
          'b' => 'B',
          'c' => 'C',
          'e' => 'E'
        };
[download]

On the RedHat systems, they come ALWAYS the same! The perl versions are all different : MDK 9.2 has Perl 5.8.3, RH 8.0 perl 5.8.0, and RHES 5.8.5.

I've also tested the scripts on a Fedora Core 4 machine : the two copies of a hash comes in a different order, but always the same from a run to another....

 perl -e 'my %t=qw(a A b B c C d D e E); print join("", %t) . "\n"'
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The 2 slackware, the 2 debian Sarge and the Ubuntu machine show the same behaviour : they always give the same result :

eEcCaAbBdD
[download]

The Mac OS X gives a different result each run. So now, it looks like the usual way isn't what I thought it to be... Is the Perl documentation out of sync, or is there something fishy in most Linux distros out there?