You are indeed correct. I've just gotten into the habit of localizing globals when I'm about to alter them, and I want to be sure I didn't sabotage someone else up the line.

I tend to assume that someone else reading the code might not think about $_ being global, alter the code so that $_ would get clobbered, and then be confused. If I've localized $_, and also commented why I've done it, it makes it easier to maintain. And I'm all about maintaining.

I suppose the Right Thing would be to not localize and comment that the for loop does it for me. :)