in reply to subtractionn in an array

I strongly recommend you add use strict; to every script you write. Also you should always use the three parameter version of open and lexical file handles (a variable declared with my): open my $fileIn, '<', 'filename.txt' or die "Unable to open filename.txt: $!\n".

There are lots of ways to solve your problem and some of them don't need an array at all. Consider:

use strict; use warnings; my $lastValue = <DATA>; chomp $lastValue; while (<DATA>) { chomp; print $_ - $lastValue, "\n"; $lastValue = $_; } __DATA__ 1 76 34 6 12 5

Prints:

75 -42 -28 6 -7

Use perldoc to look up chomp and defined if you aren't familiar with them.

True laziness is hard work