Mark Sargent wrote: > Hi All, Hello,
> am new to Perl. I'm followig this tutorial, > > http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/variables.html That web site was last updated 8 years ago and is talking about Perl4 while the current version of Perl is 5.8. And even if you are still using Perl4 (ick) there are some serious errors there: http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/variables.html access Individual items in array accessed as scalars. $aList[0] # first item in @aList $aList[0,1] # slice, first two items in @aList $aList[0,1] is NOT a slice of two items because the '$' at the front means that it is a scalar or one item. A slice would be @aList[0,1]. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/regular_expressions.html join( ) Approximately the opposite of split. Takes a list of values, concatenates them, and returns the resulting string. Form: $var = join("item_1", $item2, . . .); Example: $a = join('cat", "dog", "bird"); # returns "catdogbird" $a = join($b, $c); That is incorrect. join("cat", "dog", "bird") returns "dogcatbird" http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/io.html 5.1 File system I/O standard files Perl provides access to the standard files: STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR. STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are not files, they are filehandles which are usually connected to the file /dev/tty on Unix systems. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~jbs/resources/perl/perl-basics/system.html opendir Opens a directory so that subsequent operations can read the members of the directory, as described below. Takes two arguments: a filehandle that will be used with subsequent readdir operators and the path to the directory to be opened; the operator returns true/false indicating success/failure. opendir and its relatives do NOT use filehandles they use directory handles and you cannot perform filehandle operations on a directory handle nor can you perform directory handle operations on a filehandle, for example: opendir A, 'directory' or die $!; open A, 'file' or die $!; # OK, filehandle A is different then dir handle A $a = <A>; # reads from filehandle A opendir B, 'dir' or die $!; $b = <B>; # won't work because B is a directory handle! All in all I would say that this is a very old and not very good tutorial. John -- use Perl; program fulfillment -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
