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our EXPR

An our declares the listed variables to be valid globals within the enclosing block, file, or eval. That is, it has the same scoping rules as a "my" declaration, but does not create a local variable. If more than one value is listed, the list must be placed in parentheses. The our declaration has no semantic effect unless "use strict vars" is in effect, in which case it lets you use the declared global variable without qualifying it with a package name. (But only within the lexical scope of the our declaration. In this it differs from "use vars", which is package scoped.)

An our declaration declares a global variable that will be visible across its entire lexical scope, even across package boundaries. The package in which the variable is entered is determined at the point of the declaration, not at the point of use. This means the following behavior holds:

package Foo;
our $bar;		# declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope
$bar = 20;

package Bar;
print $bar;		# prints 20

Multiple our declarations in the same lexical scope are allowed if they are in different packages. If they happened to be in the same package, Perl will emit warnings if you have asked for them.

use warnings;
package Foo;
our $bar;		# declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope
$bar = 20;

package Bar;
our $bar = 30;	# declares $Bar::bar for rest of lexical scope
print $bar;		# prints 30

our $bar;		# emits warning