LPM: variable comparison not working

[Tom Braun]

Ok, I'm trying to do some simple input data checking on a script I'm
writing.  $book is a string entered from the keyboard.  @books is a list of
available books.  Both are chomped, so no new lines should be present.  I'm
doing something like this:

$valid = 0;
foreach (@books) {
	if ($_ eq $book) {
		$valid = 1;
		last;
}
}

This never matches, even when $book is a value in @books.  In trying to
figure out why, I added a print statement to it as shown:

$valid = 0;
foreach (@books) {
	if ($_ eq $book) {
		$valid = 1;
		last;
}
print "$valid-$book-$_-\n";
}

I get output like the following (I used dashes since none of the variables
should have them):

--galatians-galatians
--galatians-ephesians
--galatians-philippians
...
0-galatians-philemon-

As if this is not interesting enough, I tried it on my Windows 95 box
(running ActivePerl 5.6) and it worked fine (I'm writing and was testing it
on Linux).  However, my linux box gives the same results from both Perl
5.005 and Perl 5.6.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?  I've been beating my head
against this for a couple days and just am not seeing it.  Thanks

Tom