in reply to calculate sum of numbers inside a text file

Hello CR18, and welcome to the Monastery!

You should look into the core module List::Util, and the module List::MoreUtils. They provide useful functionality for processing arrays:

#! perl use strict; use warnings; use List::Util 'sum0'; use List::MoreUtils 'part'; my @array = @ARGV ? @ARGV : qw( -1 1 7 -4 3 -51 4 47 -87 ); @array = sort { $a <=> $b } @array; my @part = part { $_ >= 0 } @array; printf "Order of array: %s\n", join ' ', @array; printf "Sum of all: %d\n", sum0 @array; printf "Sum of positive: %d\n", sum0 @{ $part[1] }; printf "Sum of negative: %d\n", sum0 @{ $part[0] };

Output:

17:47 >perl 1384_SoPW.pl Order of array: -87 -51 -4 -1 1 3 4 7 47 Sum of all: -81 Sum of positive: 62 Sum of negative: -143 17:47 >

Update: Simplified code by replacing sum with sum0.

Some notes on your code:

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,