http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1019986


in reply to Perl: last evaluated value as a returned value for a subroutine. See inside

I modified your code a bit so you can see what's happening:

use strict; my $R; my $i=1; sub mySub { printf "\n\n%d. R = \"%s\"\n",$i++,$R; unless ($R) { print "CONDITION WORKS\n"; $R = 'some string'; } } print mySub(); #prints CONDITION WORKS\nsome string print mySub(); #prints some string print mySub(); #again
This ends up producing this for an output:
1. R = "" CONDITION WORKS some string 2. R = "some string" some string 3. R = "some string" some string
On the first iteration $R is undefined and there for in a "false" state. Therefore your print inside the "unless" gets executed and an assignment gets performed on $R. Where it gets trickier is the next iterations. Since you have unless($R) as the last evalutation the value of $R becomes the return value for the sub since you didn't specify one. see sub and search for "return" if you want more on this.


Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg