I don't understand any of your questions, but I'll try and answer what it is I think you're asking. I beg your forgiveness if I'm wrong.

my @words = map { split } <FH>;
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Four things are happening here...

• <FH> is being evaluated in list context because of map. So it will return a list of lines from FH.
• split will take each of those lines in turn, and split them by it's default, which is whitespace (it's more complicated than that, see split for the details). split returns a list of the words in a line
• map takes each list returned by split and adds them to @words
• @words ends up as an array of words, taken from each line in your file.

Why is this evaluating split of array to scalar?

Because it's within a string. Perl evaluates print "\@lines1 is @lines1" as print '@lines1 is ' . @lines1. Concatenation forces scalar context on its operands. scalar @lines1 returns the number of element in the array.

See my reply below for the real answer to this.

print "@lines1" is treated magically: each element of @lines1 is printed, separated by a space.

update: ysth pointed out that what I'd written was wrong. Sorry about that.

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