Your line 17

my $pms = join("\n", @foundfiles), "\n";
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If your purpose is to concatenate the two elements, then you should use the "." (dot) operator instead.

Perhaps you saw this working:

print  join("\n", @foundfiles), "\n";
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And that's fine, because print expects a list of arguments.

As for the diagnostics business, what merlyn meant is to include the -Mdiagnostics in you command line. That is, if your script is called "lory.pl" you can run it this way:

$ perl -Mdiagnostics lory.pl
Useless use of a constant in void context at lory.pl line 17 (#1)
    (W void) You did something without a side effect in a context that
+ does
    nothing with the return value, such as a statement that doesn't re
+turn a
    value from a block, or the left side of a scalar comma operator.  
+Very
    often this points not to stupidity on your part, but a failure of 
+Perl
    to parse your program the way you thought it would.  For example, 
+you'd
    get this if you mixed up your C precedence with Python precedence 
+and
    said

        $one, $two = 1, 2;

    when you meant to say

        ($one, $two) = (1, 2);

    Another common error is to use ordinary parentheses to construct a
+ list
    reference when you should be using square or curly brackets, for
    example, if you say

        $array = (1,2);

    when you should have said

        $array = [1,2];

    The square brackets explicitly turn a list value into a scalar val
+ue,
    while parentheses do not.  So when a parenthesized list is evaluat
+ed in
    a scalar context, the comma is treated like C's comma operator, wh
+ich
    throws away the left argument, which is not what you want.  See
    perlref for more on this.
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All the lines you see are the result of diagnostic, which is explaining verbosely what you previously got in a dry warning.

HTH

my $pms = join("\n", @foundfiles), "\n";
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my $pms = join("\n", @foundfiles) . "\n";
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Update: Thanks tye. This will teach me to try and answer a PM post while answering support calls at work. Next time I'll ignore the calls.. must have my priorities straight.

Good catch.

Rather minor correction: The original gets parsed as:

( my $pms = join("\n", @foundfiles) ), "\n";
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not as

my $pms = ( join("\n", @foundfiles), "\n" );
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so it is the "\n" that gets thrown away.
                - tye

dbwiz is correct; the original program snippet I snatched from a reply Ovid made to someone only had the print command; I added the rest to get it to a file. I also got the command line to show me the diagnostics I wanted. Thanks!

I changed my program as indicated, and it eliminates the error message, and I still get my expected output. Thanks to all of you for explaining, parsing, the Unix lesson, etc.!

A question: do you really need to join your array into a string?

Unless you need your scalar $pms for something else later in your programme, I would suggest doing away with this line:

and printing your array directly:

print "$_\n" for @foundfiles;
print MYOUTPUT "$_\n" for @foundfiles;
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dave

Good question. I was thinking the join was necessary because it was joining the path info to the new line character. Of course, this just goes to show you what happens when you steal snippets, tinker with them, and just THINK you know how they work! ;-)

I tried it your way and it works just fine! Thanks for showing me another way (which always adds more dimension to my learning and understanding Perl!).