Its interesting to see myself go from reading books that teach perl that is poor form (never mentioning -w or strict) to hearing how a monk should really be putting the digital plume to scripture.
I think I am finally understanding the use of seek(); and why just copying and pasting it from another's example didnt work.

My code looked like:

      open FILE, "$filename" or die $!;
      flock(FILE,2);
      seek(FILE,0,2);
        @entries = <FILE>;
      flock(FILE,8);

[download]

Yet when I went to view the contents of @entries, it was empty. I scratched my head for hours on this one since all the examples of seek I had seen seemed to call it with (FILEHANDLE,0,2). Finally, I came to some sort of enlightenment thinking that since the whence portion of the seek statement was set to 2, the @entries list is only reading from the end of the FILEHANDLE on. When I changed the entry to seek(FILEHANDLE,0,0) the outcome was more what I expected.

So, I guess I am looking for someone with more experienced robes than mine to give me the nod that this logic is correct and the moral of "never blindly copy another's code" fits the bill.

humbly -c

In reply to seek(UNDERSTANDING); by c

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