Hello masood91, and welcome to the Monastery!

In Perl, arguments are passed into subroutines by reference (as opposed to a language like C, in which arguments are passed by value). The special variable @_ contains aliases to the arguments passed in, so you can use them directly:

sub abc
{
    $_[0] = 42;
}

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but that changes the variables outside of the subroutine. For example, if the above were called as follows:

my $x = 17;
abc($x);

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then after the subroutine call $x would contain 42. Since this is usually not what you want, it is standard practice to simulate pass-by-value by copying the arguments as the first statement in the subroutine:

sub abc
{
    my ($x, $y, $z) = @_;
}

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or (less commonly):

sub abc
{
    my @args = @_;
}

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(Note that @_ is an array variable.) To remove the first element from an array and get its value, Perl provides shift:

my $num = shift @array;

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After this operation the first element in @array has been removed and stored in the scalar variable $num. Now, within a subroutine, if shift is used without an argument then it automatically applies to @_. Hence, another common idiom is:

sub abc
{
    my $x = shift;
    my $y = shift;
    my $z = shift;
}

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which does the same as:

sub abc
{
    my ($x, $y, $z) = @_;
}

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except that with shift the elements are also removed from the @_ array.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: difficulty in understanding use of @_ and shift in a subroutine by Athanasius
in thread difficulty in understanding use of @_ and shift in a subroutine by masood91

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