What's the neatest way to extract two items from an array returned by a function?

cjk32 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello, I was wondering if there's a neater way to achive the following:

my ($uid,$pgid) = (getpwnam("nobody"))[2..3];
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I vaguely remember some sort of syntax along the lines of,

my (,,$uid,$pid) = getpwnam("nobody");
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but can't get it to work. Regards, Chris

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Re: What's the neatest way to extract two items from an array returned by a function? by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Aug 24, 2007 at 15:29 UTC
Use undef: `my (undef, undef, $uid,$pid) = getpwnam("nobody");` but I prefer the slice, anyway:)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: What's the neatest way to extract two items from an array returned by a function? by cjk32 (Novice) on Aug 24, 2007 at 15:44 UTC
Thanks, now that you mention it, the slice probably is neater anyway.	[reply]
Re: What's the neatest way to extract two items from an array returned by a function? by andreas1234567 (Vicar) on Aug 25, 2007 at 06:43 UTC
The functions like getpwnam are context sensitive, which means they will return differently in list and scalar context: `$ cat 634897.pl use strict; use warnings; my $name = q{nobody}; print scalar ( getpwnam($name) ); print scalar ( getgrnam($name) ); print join (q{,}, getpwnam($name) ); __END__ $ perl -l 634897.pl 99 99 nobody,x,99,99,,,Nobody,/,/sbin/nologin` [download] -- Andreas	[reply] [d/l]