You got bitten by yet another facet of Perl which is sensitive to the calling context. In LIST context the diamond operator (<FH>) does indeed return a list of all the lines in the file (separated by the current value of $/). However in SCALAR context it just returns the next line (again, separated by $/). This mjd USENET posting may clear things up if you're still fuzzy. If you ever see "strange" behavior like this check the docs and make sure it's not context sensitive.