I guess I'm in the clear, then. I understood what the code did before reading your explanation, but not "immediately", so I should be safe to spend more time with Perl. Whew. What a relief.

It was the numerical context that hung me up for a few seconds. I kept wondering what good a += operator was to $\ since, like a good little code monkey, I would (almost) never want to add numbers to it from a file for no purpose other than printing them out, and would thus not have fed it numerical input, which didn't make sense to me. Silly me, I was thinking "useful code", not "mild obfu".