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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Weirdness with <> input operator
Message-ID: <11650@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 1 Mar 91 19:00:42 GMT
References: <1991Feb28.171434.6125@wuphys.wustl.edu>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 20

In article <1991Feb28.171434.6125@wuphys.wustl.edu> marty@wuphys.UUCP (Marty Olevitch) writes:
: Also, I found that using the <> operator with an array argument,
: for example <@foo> , reads the next item in the foo array. But I didn't
: see this documented in the perl book, at least where the main discussion
: of the input operator takes place. Going back to the first example,
: does perl think that $handle[$i] is supposed to be an array?

No, it thinks it's a glob.  The only kind of indirect filehandle allowed
is a bare scalar variable with no intervening whitespace:

	<$indirect_filehandle>

Anything else is a glob (interpreted like a double-quoted string first).

It could be argued that <> is too heavily overloaded, but it's nice to be
able to say:

	while (<$dir/*.bak>) { ...

Larry