[Melbourne-pm] Simple(?) question involving backticks and die

Benji Wakely benji at arsimagica.net
Wed Jan 4 20:56:57 PST 2006


Greetings all.

I'm confused by this behaviour...

When I look at the two lines of code:

  my @list = `/bin/ls /home` || die ("Couldn't list files");

  die ("Couldn't list files") unless my @list = `/bin/ls /home`;

they to be equivalent to me.
The perl interpreter begs to differ, however, because:

The first invocation generates:
$list[0] = "alfred betty charlie"

and the second invocation fills the list up one element at a time,
eg. 
$list[0] = "alfred";
$list[1] = "betty";
$list[2] = "charlie";

...I was just curious to know what actually causes this 
difference in behaviour.
Any takers?

--
Benji Wakely
+614 0958 8566
benji at arsimagica.net


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