You have a precedence problem. Quoth B::Deparse your code parses as: print(((('number of files: ' . $size) - 2) . "\n"));. print takes a list so you should use a comma rather than the concatenation operator ..

thank you thank you thank you.
I spent a better half of today trying to figure it out.
I guess I'll read up on the . vs , :)
Thanks Again!

Theiss

To make it clearer that it is purely a precedence issue though, you can fix your existing statement by making precedence explicit with brackets:

print "number of files: " . ($size-2) . "\n";

Also check out perlop for the precedence table. . and - bind at the same level. , is lower on the table, so the minus would get executed first.

--MidLifeXis

The tomes, scrolls etc are dusty because they reside in a dusty old house, not because they're unused. --hangon in this post

• Note that the error indicated

  "number of files: 4" isn't numeric

  rather than

  "4" isn't numeric

• Subtracting 2 is not the way to go. Some directories on some file systems don't have "." and "..". It's better to just filter them out.

  # Filter out "." and ".."
  my @array = grep !/^\.\.?\z/, readdir(DIR);
  [download]

  # Filter out all "hidden" files
  my @array = grep !/^\./, readdir(DIR);
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• There's no reason to use a global variable for your directory handle. Change

  opendir (DIR, "/some/path");
  my @array = grep !/^\.\.\z/, readdir(DIR);
  closedir (DIR);
  [download]

  to

  opendir (my $dh, "/some/path");
  my @array = grep !/^\.\.\z/, readdir($dh);
  closedir ($dh);
  [download]

• Finally, you should have some error checking, if only something minimalistic for opendir

  opendir (my $dh, "/some/path")
      or die("opendir: $!\n");
  [download]

I've always been partial to:

use File::Slurp;
my @files = read_dir( '/path/to/dir' ) ;
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