Re: Odd workings of split

[Jenda]

One more, kinda unrelated, point. In Perl, unlike say in C#, the foreach loop variable is an alias to the list element and MAY be modified. So there is no reason to bother with the indices:

for (@cmd) {
  $_ = [split "\n", $_]->[0];
}

Next thing ... you don't have to create an anonymous reference and then dereference it to get the first element from a list returned by a subroutine. A pair of braces is enough:

for (@cmd) {
  $_ = (split "\n", $_)[0];
}

And last there really is no reason to avoid regexps. They tend to make the code simpler.

for (@cmd) {
  s/\n.*$//s;
}

[Ralesk]

Nice summary, thanks :)

Re your 2nd code snippet, I swear I’ve run into Perl (5.10) complaining about )[ before, but I have no idea anymore what I did to make it not like it. Your code does work though… Much to my surprise really.

[Jenda]

The important thing is that the () is abound the whole subroutine call, not just around the parameters. split("\n", $cmd[$_])[0] would not work.