The reason for using that expression is probably that the original script author was (wisely) including a "-w" flag on the shebang line, or put "use warnings;" near the top of the script. In those cases, the $x ||= 0; will prevent perl from issuing a warning about "use of undefined value in numeric comparison" or "use of undefined value in print".
Works for strings too: $x ||= '': will avoid warnings about using an undefined value in a print, string concatenation, string comparison, regular expression, and so on.
It's not that undefined values are inherently bad -- sometimes you want a variable to be undef, and if you really want to use undef values in a print or a comparison to some actual value, you can modify the "use warnings" pragma to say which warnings it should ignore. But such "special needs" cases are pretty rare (and probably avoidable).
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Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
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Snippets of code should be wrapped in
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