note ioannis When you access a HoH this way, a random child-hash is printed; the is no guaranty it will be the first child-hash because the hash has no concept of element ordering. You will receive a random element. <code> # All these are random accesses. my ( $any ) = values %$hoh; print "source: ", ${[values %$hoh]}[0]{source}; </code> 555478 555478