I wrote a script that works okay, then I decided to add the "use strict" and "use warnings" to it, and all #$%^@?! has broken loose. Took me half the day to fix everything it was complaining about, but in the process I found two bugs in my script (one of which made me wonder why my script was working in the first place... ah, wondrous perl!), so I suppose it's worth the effort.

Though honesty I wish there were a way to tell perl that the outer most variables were okay not to use the package::variable name... because sticking $main::varname in some of my more specific subs, where I know what I'm doing is really tedious.

Anyhoo... I have one warning left...

Here's a very abbreviated example of the problem:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
sub SymLinkFind($);

my %params;
$params{recurseDir} = ".";
SymLinkFind(\%params);
print "Found ", $params{numoLinks}, " Symbolic Links...\n";

sub SymLinkFind($) {
  my $reparams = shift;
  my @SymLinks;

  sub inlineFind {
    my $namey = $File::Find::name;
    if (-l) {
      push @SymLinks, $namey;
    }
  }
  find \&inlineFind, $reparams->{recurseDir};
  $reparams->{Links} = \@SymLinks;
  $reparams->{numoLinks} = scalar(@SymLinks);
  return;
}
[download]

The problem is I get a warning that says:

Variable "@SymLinks" will not stay shared at ./test.pl line 21.

I think this is telling me that were I to attempt to call FindSymLinks again, that due to the internal variable being used in the nested subroutine (named inlineFind) that it would behave as though it were (c equivalent to) a static variable, retaining its values from the last time the function was called, rather than creating a fresh new @SymLinks array.

Is this a correct understanding of the warning? And is there a way to get rid of this warning?

I read somewhere that if I were to assign the sub inlineFind to a variable and provide the reference to that sub through the variable assignment, that it would do some kind of magic and fix the issue, but I haven't been able to figure a way to create a perl variable that references the nested sub.

Any ideas from the gurus?

Thanks,

--Ray