Others have commented at great length on the shortcomings of your program, so 'm not going to add to that.

I'm interested in knowing how you picked up so many bad habits. How did you learn Perl? Did you teach yourself from reading a book? Or did you find a tutorial on the web? Or were you taught by someone who claimed to know Perl, but obviously doesn't?

I'm very interested in finding out how people learn bad Perl so that we can work on replacing the resources that they use with better ones, so any information that you can give me would be great.

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg