Ah, the joys of debugging global variables! Iron-clad employment insurance!! You'll be working on this until the end of time — or until the company goes under, not unlikely if they've got a lot of code like this.
Here's one approach, not necessarily the best: track down the package the hash lives in (assuming it's a package global):
c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"no strict qw(refs vars);
no warnings;
;;
package Foo;
%CONTACTS = ('hello' => 'sailor');
;;
package Bar;
$ZOT{'autovivified'} = 'bam';
;;
package main;
;;
my $rx_pkg = qr{ \A (?: [[:alpha:]] [[:alnum:]]* ::)+ \z }xms;
;;
print qq{'$_'} for
grep m{ $rx_pkg }xms,
keys %main::
;
print '';
;;
print qq{'$_' has 'CONTACTS'} for
grep exists ${$_}{CONTACTS},
grep m{ $rx_pkg }xms,
keys %main::
;
print '';
;;
print qq{'$_' has 'ZOT'} for
grep exists ${$_}{ZOT},
grep m{ $rx_pkg }xms,
keys %main::
;
print '';
;;
print $Foo::CONTACTS{'hello'};
print $Bar::ZOT{'autovivified'};
"
'version::'
'utf8::'
're::'
'CORE::'
'DynaLoader::'
'mro::'
'strict::'
'Win32CORE::'
'Bar::'
'Regexp::'
'UNIVERSAL::'
'Foo::'
'main::'
'Carp::'
'Win32::'
'PerlIO::'
'IO::'
'Exporter::'
'Internals::'
'warnings::'
'DB::'
'Foo::' has 'CONTACTS'
'Bar::' has 'ZOT'
sailor
bam
Note that:
-
This code only runs if some strictures are disabled (no strict qw(refs vars);) — and it doesn't hurt to disable warnings also — you may have to turn all these off locally;
-
This shows the package the hash lives in, but how it got there is another story;
-
The example code shows hash definition in Foo, autovivification in Bar. For your purposes, they amount to the same thing.
Updates:
- Added
no strict qw(refs vars);
no warnings;
statements to example code.
- Check out Packages and Symbol Tables in perlmod.
-
Actually, on re-reading the docs, I think
my $rx_pkg = qr{ \A (?: [[:alpha:]_] \w* ::)+ \z }xms;
would be a better definition of the package name regex.
Give a man a fish: <%-(-(-(-<