Hi!

I'll just answer that question, since merlyn has stated often enough that he doesn't have the time to answer all the "easy" questions.

Lines 2 and 3 put those filenames into the @ARGV array, which has the same effect as putting those filenames in the commandline (@ARGV contains all words in the commandline after the name of the called script.) The operator <> reads from all the filenames on the commandline, or from STDIN if there are no filenames on the commandline. So line 2 and 3 actually do read those files into those arrays without needing an open statement. Beautiful!

In line 4, the array @daily is used in a scaler context, since it is compared with a scalar (3). In a scalar context an array returns its length, in this case the number of lines in the file. So you don't need that # operator, although you could use it.

I hope I got that all right, I'm pretty new to perl myself. My compliments to merlyn, that is very short yet very readable code. Perl is beautiful!

Christian

In reply to RE: Reading and writing to files: Debrief Question by cmburns
in thread Reading and writing to files by damian

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