# perl -e "print localtime()[5]"
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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I dont know about print, but assignment to a scalar works fine:

perl -e 'print $a=(localtime())[5]'
105
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Update: Or, following BrowserUK:

perl -e 'print +(localtime())[5]'
105
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Update: But not (in response to socketdave):

perl -e 'print (localtime())[5]'
syntax error at -e line 1, near ")["
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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It seems we are hitting the finer points in the parser here...

look closer at Merlyn's example... you need '(localtime())[5]' instead of 'localtime()[5]'...

Yes!

The extra parens did the trick.

Thank you all.

Note that in your original post you had parentheses around the subroutine, these is also a slight gotcha in this example if you do:

 perl -e'print (localtime())[5]'
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as the parser takes the outer parentheses to be the argument list of the print which obviously can't be subscripted meaningfully, in this case you will want to use the no-op unary plus to disambiguate the context of the subscript:

 perl -e'print +(localtime())[5]'
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/J\

which should read:

print +(localtime)[5]
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(note the + before the opening bracet, to prevent print from thinking it's his. When assigning to a variable, you say:

my $year = (localtime)[5]
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just as you state in your own post :)

Paul

That's not a very good test. Here's a very small program that does what you say you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

sub retarray {
   my $param = shift;
   my @array=(1,2,3,4,5,56);
   return @array;
}
my $param = 2;
my $val = (retarray($param))[3];
print "val is $val\n";
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Try:

perl -e "print((localtime)[5])"
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or:

perl -e "print+(localtime)[5]"
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Quiz: can you explain why:

perl -e "print (localtime)[5]"
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gives a syntax error?