To answer your question on local, it makes a temporary copy of a higher-scoped variable. For example:

my $fred = "foo";
for (my $idx = 1; $idx <= 10; $idx++) {
    local $fred;
    $fred = $fred x $idx;
    print $fred, "\n" # foo, foofoo, foofoofoo...
}
print $fred, "\n"; # foo

[download]

So once your for loop is done, even though you kept modifying fred each time, at the end of the loop, fred is still "foo".

EDIT: Apparently my understanding of local was not correct. Live and learn. If somone would delete this post I would appreciate it.

In reply to Re: nuances of my, and maybe local by samurai
in thread nuances of my, and maybe local by Helter

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