I was under the impression that @_ would be passed to functions that were called with no arguments, like shift. This rings true except in the case of calling shift in package main, outside of a subroutine where it will shift of @ARGV. Why does it do this, and how can I get shift to work on @_ without copying @_ to @ARGV and not supplying arguments to shift? Or is this possible? Here is the code I've been playing with: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

@_ = qw( hello world );

### prints everything in @ARGV but nothing in @_
while(my $d = shift) {
    print "$d\n";
}

### prints nothing because @ARGV is empty
### doesn't even print @_ contents
while(my $n = shift) {
    print "$n\n";
}

[download]

In reply to @_ the default variable? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.