Hmm, his code seems perfectly right to me. Your code skips the case where the children array may have only 1 element.

@bing = ("1");
print scalar @bing," ",$#bing,$/;
if ($#bing > 0) { # your conditional
 print "Would execute$/"; 
}
else {
 print "Wouldn't execute$/";
}

__END__

Results:
1 0
Wouldn't execute
[download]

antirice    
The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl
The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1