disable auto-instantiation or warn about it

[Frank v Waveren]

Lectori Salutem (or, if you prefer, "Hello"),

I'm going to veer dangerously on-topic here and ask a perl question
that's been bothering me for some time:

Is there any way to turn off auto-instantiation, or at least to make
perl emit a warning when it happens?

The auto-instantiation I mean here is the kind that makes evaluating
"$foo->{bar}" turn $foo into a hashref if it's undef. It's a nice
feature in some cases, but especially in larger projects it's a huge
source of bugs, in my experience.

Alternatively, for a partial credit, you can tell me how to delete a
file starting with -.

Frank