in reply to Why are my numbers not numeric???

The only time you actually print anything is when you do this:

my ($i, $j); print "$i\t $j\n";

$i and $j don't contain anything. What were you expecting to print, then?

Perhaps, after following the advice given by Abigail-II and thens, you mean to say:

print scalar(@nums), "\t", scalar(@nums2), "\n";

bbfu
Black flowers blossom
Fearless on my breath