Re^2: reading several lines in a gulp

[raybies]

Why is scalar used in that? What's the effect? I'm staring crosseyed at this very useful solution, can someone decompress this one for me?

Thanks ahead of time for all you experts and your great solutions...

--Ray

[moritz]

push evaluates the second argument in list context, so that would slurp the whole file. scalar force the <$filehandle> operator (which calls readline under the hood) to only read one line.

[Eliya]

Why is scalar used in that? What's the effect?

push imposes list context (you can push more than one element in one statement), and <$file> would read the whole file at once in list context (as pointed out in the OP).

In other words, without scalar, the whole file would be read in the first iteration, which would kind of defeat the purpose of the exercise...