sorry for the lack of commenting

Apologise not for the lack of comments, but for

• not using strict and warnings¹
• very poor formatting of your code
• using chop (which may be correct and proper for you, but is a real bad code smell to me)

My intuition tells me "your" code has been generated by another program.

--
¹ I would expect you to know this after "a little over a year" with Perl