As I was typing my reply - my box crashed, so you undoubtedly already have your answer.

I am very suprised that you have never seen a script that uses my to scope an array. It is used to scope a variable to enclosing brackets (or Main if there are no enclosing brackets).

Consider the following VERY contrived example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @array;  # no enclosing braces - scoped to Main
my $var1 = 3;
my $var2 = 4;
foreach (1..10) {
   push @array , $_;
}
if ($var2 > $var1) {
   my @array = ($var1 , $var2);
   print "$_\n" foreach (@array);
}
print "Other array\n";
print "$_\n" foreach (@array);
[download]

This allows you to use the same variable name numerous times within the same program without stepping on each other. It should not be confused with local, which I will leave you to read the Perl docs to grok.

Cheers - L~R