SPUG: spug: What is the idiomatic way to extract first/last item after split?

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2005, Uri London wrote:
>
>
>   What is the idiomatic way to extract first/last item after split?
>
>   More interestingly, why #2 doesn't work, while #3 does?

If I want the first and last items from a split, I would probably do it
something like:

	my ($first, @rest) = split(...);
	my $last = pop(@rest);

If working with file names, I'm more likely to use File::Basename and/or
the tools in File::Path to do something that's not OS dependent.

Bill
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