I am trying to understand Larry's filename fixer. I saw it first in the cookbook and am now looking here to find help. I am new to Perl, but I think (I hope) I understand everything the script does. The only thing I don't get is how all the matching filenames end up in @ARGV. So if I call the rename script in a directory with three txt files like so:

rename 's/foo/bar/' *.txt

@ARGV would be an Array with four entries like this right?

after the shift that removes the 's/foo/bar/' I am then left with the @ARGV that contains just the file names. The script then loops through all of them and works it's magic, so far so good.

What I do not understand is how the script determines which files to put into @ARGV. At which point is "*.txt" being evaluated? Or is it the shell that tells the script which files in the directory match the pattern *.txt?

This is probably a daft question but any help is much appreciated, as I said I am very new to this.