Of course, for is indeed a looping construct, but in this case the for loops each have only one iteration. The programmer is using the "for" to set the default variable $_ to the value of $os or $hardware in each case, then performing a regular expression match (/.../), implicitly on $_, against various values. Older Perls (5.8 and prior) do not have a switch statement (well, given/when statement), so various other approaches have been used in the past to emulate one. I would probably not use this particular approach myself, but it seems to work well enough.

In reply to Re: for loop ? by philipbailey
in thread for loop ? by stevensw

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