stupid question, why do you all put "my" in front of the scalars?

Not stupid at all - it is to limit the scope. This is a very important concept in computing generally and is not just limited to Perl. However, you could do an awful lot worse than read the canonical article by Dominus: Coping with Scoping which deals with the whole issue of variable declaration in Perl. It goes into more depth that you'll need just now but it won't steer you wrong.

In reply to Re^5: appending to html at beginning ( use CGI for parsing cgi) by hippo
in thread appending to html at beginning by Limbomusic

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