I'm fairly new to Perl and my searches for an answer to this question drew thousands of irrelevant matches due to the vagueness of my issue. I was toying with repeating a sequence and Perl appears to be doing arithmetic with the 'x' operator: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

print "Enter some strings:\n";
my @lines = <>;

print 0..9 x 2, "\n";
foreach (@lines) {
        printf "%20s", $_;
}

[download]

This produces a header line: 

$ ./ex05-02.pl
Enter some strings:
asdfasdfasdf
asdfa
asdfasdfasd
asdf
0123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839
+404142434445464748495051525354555657585960616263646566676869707172737
+475767778798081828384858687888990919293949596979899
       asdfasdfasdf
              asdfa
        asdfasdfasd
               asdf

[download]

Not 01234567890123456789 as I had expected it to, ultimately I wanted a 20 character header but 0..9 x 2 is being interpreted unexpectedly for me. I would love for anyone to be able to shed some light on why this happening.

In reply to Seemingly odd behavior of sequence by jar00n

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