Since you were curious, here's the (fixed) real world code: 

use File::Temp (qw/tempfile/);
(($fh,$fname) = tempfile('quanta-XXXX')) 
  || die "Couldn't create temp file $fname\n";

[download]

The results without the extra parens differed a bit from the example above, though. $fh got set to a GLOB (a filehandle, I assume). This is the /first/ element in the array return, not the last.

I understand why that is now, though-- the || forced the subroutine to scalar context, in which it just returns a filehandle.

This made it more mysterious to debug though, since it wasn't returning just the last element of the array, which I might have recognized sooner.

Thanks to all for your help.

Mark

In reply to Re: Re: question about || operator and list context by markjugg
in thread question about || operator and list context by markjugg

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