I'm trying to get all of the elements of an array except for the last one,

Just for grins I whipped up the following code:

use Data::Dumper;
use strict;
 
my @foo=qw / a b c d e f / ;
 
printf "Before:\n";
print Dumper(\@foo);
 
$#foo--;
 
 
printf "After:\n";
print Dumper(\@foo);
[download]

When run it produced:

Before:
$VAR1 = [
          'a',
          'b',
          'c',
          'd',
          'e',
          'f'
        ];
After:
$VAR1 = [
          'a',
          'b',
          'c',
          'd',
          'e'
        ];
[download]

The key here is the decrement of $#foo which reduces the maximum index value for the array @foo. IIRC the element you are disassocating will be reaped in memory eventually.