Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your post, but it kind of sounds like you're trying to determine the size of the array for the purpose of creating an array with that number of elements. In Perl, you don't need to know the planned/needed size of the array to create the array. In your code, you just need something like my @list; to create an empty array named 'list'.

You might find the following perldocs useful:

• perldata
• push
• pop
• shift
• unshift