No jfredett, nothing fancy with the 'foo' which is just the name of file in which I saved the script. On unix, $0 just returns 'perl' not the path of the running script like on Windose. So I'm just doing a direct 'open' on my script to read the source.

Parens in perl is a list operator. They say package these item up as a list. If you already have a list, say in a $scalar or returned from a function call, then using parens is redundent. Arguments to function call also are passed as a list so when you say "print $a, $b" perl knows you mean "pass a list consisting of $a followed by $b". And will try very hard to make sense of your code. But perl would get confused if we used this inside another list such as "join ' ', print $a, $b , $some_other_stuff". How would perl know if $some_other_stuff went with "join" or "print"? So sometime we have to use parens to be clear to perl what we mean. But I look at a lot of the code here on perlmonks you'll see that for simple statements parens are often not used.

We all learn perl in smallish bites so hang in there.