Chapter 4. Perl Pitfalls

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

“That was the curious incident, remarked Sherlock Holmes.”

—Talking with Inspector Gregory, in Silver Blaze, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

We are not out to “get” Perl in this chapter. Enumerating traps people can fall into when using Perl is like finding technical errors in the movie Apollo 13; people do it because they can, whereas with many other languages (or movies), the nits would be too numerous to be worth attempting to pick. What we are going to do is cover some of the places where a little more knowledge would help prevent common errors. You'll find more in the core Perl documentation section perltrap.