Program Repair Shop

Declarations

     478      my ($first_block);         # read a block here
     479      my (%first_block_by_name); # save block by filename
     480        # this can get rather large, thus the need to free this ASAP
     481        # and return only the filenames as results
     482  
     483      my ($filenm);
     484      my ($first_file);
     485      my (@return_LoL);

Similarly, this is just wasted space
I suspect that the author is an experienced C programmer
- Perl code written by such people has a distinctive aroma
Even in C, we could do this better
In C, you can declare variables at the head of any block:

        /* C */
        if (buf = malloc(bufsize)) {
          char *p = buf;
          ...
        }

In Perl, you can declare variables anywhere