It helps when you code your application in a structured way, using the perl packages, but as you probably know once you start using packages it's much harder to share the variables between the various packagings. A configuration package comes to mind as a good example of the package that will want its variables to be accessible from the other modules.

Of course using the Object Oriented (OO) programming is the best way to provide an access to variables through the access methods. But if you are not yet ready for OO techniques you can still benefit from using the techniques I'm going to talk about.

Making Variables Global

When you first wrote $x in your code you created a (package) global variable. It is visible everywhere in your program, although if used in a package other than the package in which it was declared (main:: by default), it must be referred to with its fully qualified name, unless you have imported this variable with import(). This will work only if you do not use strict pragma; but it's very important to use this pragma if you want to run your scripts under mod_perl.