And the OP probably cargo culted got that from some old tutorial which should have been forgotten years ago. And somehow it's always often noobies that appear here with crusty code like this. Is there too much bad information out there or is the good one too hard to find?
holli
You can lead your users to water, but alas, you cannot drown them.
Comment on Re^2: Need to print file contents on page (updated)
I feel that part of it relates to the popularity and ranking a lot of legacy content has, and the (often dubious) availability of old books. For people making minimum effort it's too easy just to cut and paste something old, which 'works', for various definitions of the term. Try phrasing some "How do I .... in perl?" type questions and check out the results.