in reply to Re2: Reading the last line of a file in a Pure Way.
in thread Reading the last line of a file in a Pure Way.

Please enlighten me

how does this work and what is the }{

I realise -p feeds all lines to the script, sets the ORS to each one but how is this suppressing printing and what is the magic }{

Thanks if you spare the time

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Re^2: Re2: Reading the last line of a file in a Pure Way.
by ysth (Canon) on Aug 04, 2004 at 16:26 UTC
    -p wraps a loop around your code. You can see what it looks like:
    $ perl -MO=Deparse -pe '$\=$_}{' LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) { $\ = $_; } { (); } continue { die "-p destination: $!\n" unless print $_; }
    In effect, the }{ breaks off the continue part of the while loop that usually prints every line, so it only runs once at the end of file. Since $_ will have been set to undef at end of file, copying it to $\ preserves it so that print will show it. ($\ is implicitly added to each print by perl.)