They're two different things really -
foreach takes a list and iterates over the given list, whereas
while will keep looping until it's condition expression evaluates to false. In the first instance where you're using
foreach,
<FH> is evaluated in list context, as
foreach evaluates it's provided arguments in list context, which will then read until it reaches an
eof and then returns the lines that were read as a list. Whereas when you use a
while,
perl will auto-magically wrap your filehandle read with a check for
definedness e.g
perl -MO=Deparse -e 'while(<>) { }'
while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
();
}
-e syntax OK
Then will continue looping until the filehandle reaches an
eof, so only ever reads in a line at a time. See.
perlsyn for more info on looping.
HTH
_________
broquaint