Thanks! I'd realised I was reusing the same hash with a little Data::Dumper experimenting, but I couldn't figure out how to 'detach' the current hash - the lexical %data does that.

That all said, I just tried both of your suggestions, and the first leaves me with a single list of junk, while the second does the deal. %data in a list context like push just dumps out the contents of the hash as field-value pairs, doesn't it? So wouldn't that be \%data ? (just tested, and that works)