Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jpl-devvax!lwall
From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: simple script to write a file core dumps, why?
Keywords: perl, hpux 6.5, hp 9000/370, help
Message-ID: <7335@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 8 Mar 90 01:13:49 GMT
References: <257@cmic.UUCP>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 37

In article <257@cmic.UUCP> garvey%cmic@mips.com writes:
: Followup-To: garvey%cmic@mips.com

Don't do that.  The inews program has no idea what newsgroup
garvey%cmic@mips.com is, and I don't blame it.  You just wasted about
5 minutes of my time.  Followup-To: is used for redirecting the
discussion to another newsgroup.

:    printf(<wow>, "%s\n", $header[$i]);           #this goes to the screen, too

There are two things wrong with that.  First, <wow> is not a filehandle.
wow itself is the filehandle, and <wow> is the input symbol containing
the filehandle wow.  So the above will input a null string from output
filehandle wow, and then print it as the first argument to STDOUT,
because the second thing you did wrong was to put a comma after the
filehandle, which makes it not a filehandle.  What you wanted to say was

    printf(wow "%s\n", $header[$i]);

or

    printf wow "%s\n", $header[$i];

Better yet, make wow upper case so that if I add a reserved word "wow"
you don't have to rewrite your script.

And you probably don't want to waste a printf on a format as simple as "%s\n".
I'd just say

    open(WOW, ">wow") || die "Couldn't create wow: $!";
    ...
    print WOW $header[$i], "\n";

This is much more efficient and I think clearer.  Admittedly a little less
like C...

Larry