Re^2: Help understanding a single line of perl: my $count = $row[0] ? $row[0] : 0;

So if your @row was the result of some operation that happened to return an empty list, $count would set to 0 rather than '';

That should be "rather than undef".

Comment on Re^2: Help understanding a single line of perl: my $count = $row[0] ? $row[0] : 0;