We get the quantity of a product shipped from the database, and a list of individual carton labels from an external file. The actual contents of each carton are unknown. Working assumption would be qty per carton = shipped qty / carton count. Easy enough. But what if the division doesn't come out clean?

use POSIX qw/ceil/;
...
$sq = $shipped_quantity;
$cc = $carton_count;
foreach $label(@label_list) {
  if ($cc == 0) {
    print "Qty per carton math error";
    next OUTER;
  }
  $per_container = ceil($sq/$cc);
  $sq -= $per_container;
  $cc -= 1;
  ...
}
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If shipped quantity is 8 and carton count is 5, first 3 cartons will have 2 each, last 2 have 1.

Yeah, almost too simple to mention. But this came up today, and I remember little code bits like this better when I write them down somewhere.

Update: s/box/carton/