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LISTS can be passed into subroutines - Lists - Perl
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Perl - Lists - Lists can be passed into subroutines
Lists can be passed into subroutines

As to pass list into a subroutine, you specify the subroutine's name and then supply the list to it:

test_subroutine( 'item1', 'item2' );
test_subroutine  'item1', 'item2';     # same

Internally Perl makes aliases to those arguments and put them into the array @_ which is available within the subroutine:

@_ =  ( 'item1', 'item2' ); # Done internally by perl

You access subroutine arguments like this:

sub test_subroutine {
    print $_[0]; # item1
    print $_[1]; # item2
}

Aliasing gives you the ability to change the original value of argument passed to subroutine:

sub test_subroutine {
    $_[0] +=  2;
}

my $x =  7;
test_subroutine( $x );
print $x; # 9

To prevent inadvertent changes of original values passed into your subroutine, you should copy them:

sub test_subroutine {
    my( $copy_arg1, $copy_arg2 ) =  @_;
    $copy_arg1 += 2;
}

my $x =  7;
test_subroutine $x; # in this case $copy_arg2 will have `undef` value
print $x; # 7

To test how many arguments were passed into the subroutine, check the size of @_

sub test_subroutine {
    print scalar @_, ' argument(s) passed into subroutine';
}

If you pass array arguments into a subroutine they all will be flattened:

my @x =  ( 1, 2, 3 );
my @y =  qw/ a b c /; # ( 'a', 'b', 'c' )
test_some_subroutine @x, 'hi', @y; # 7 argument(s) passed into subroutine
# @_ =  ( 1, 2, 3, 'hi', 'a', 'b', 'c' ) # Done internally for this call

If your test_some_subroutine contains the statement $_[4] = 'd', for the above call it will cause $y[0] to have value d afterwards:

print "@y"; # d b c


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