You are using a C style for loop. The first element of the for loop header is an initialization statement, but $i doesn't actually do anything - it is a variable used in a silly place (void context) because the value isn't used there.

But, you'd be much better to use a Perl loop:

for my $i (0 .. 5006) { ... }

which makes what is going on much clearer. But for your particular problem you could:

#!/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; my $thing = join '', map{qw(a t c g)[rand 4]} 1 .. 5007; my $fName = "./test"; open my $outFile, '>', $fName or die "Can't create '$fName': $!\n"; print $outFile $thing; close $outFile;

Note the three parameter open, lexical file handle and a check that the open succeeded.

Perl is the programming world's equivalent of English

In reply to Re: Useless use of private variable in void context at by GrandFather
in thread Useless use of private variable in void context at by Anonymous Monk

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