[perl5.git] / pod / perlfunc.pod

=head1 NAME

perlfunc - Perl builtin functions

=head1 DESCRIPTION

The functions in this section can serve as terms in an expression.
They fall into two major categories: list operators and named unary
operators.  These differ in their precedence relationship with a
following comma.  (See the precedence table in L<perlop>.)  List
operators take more than one argument, while unary operators can never
take more than one argument.  Thus, a comma terminates the argument of
a unary operator, but merely separates the arguments of a list
operator.  A unary operator generally provides a scalar context to its
argument, while a list operator may provide either scalar or list
contexts for its arguments.  If it does both, the scalar arguments will
be first, and the list argument will follow.  (Note that there can ever
be only one such list argument.)  For instance, splice() has three scalar
arguments followed by a list, whereas gethostbyname() has four scalar
arguments.

In the syntax descriptions that follow, list operators that expect a
list (and provide list context for the elements of the list) are shown
with LIST as an argument.  Such a list may consist of any combination
of scalar arguments or list values; the list values will be included
in the list as if each individual element were interpolated at that
point in the list, forming a longer single-dimensional list value.
Elements of the LIST should be separated by commas.

Any function in the list below may be used either with or without
parentheses around its arguments.  (The syntax descriptions omit the
parentheses.)  If you use the parentheses, the simple (but occasionally
surprising) rule is this: It I<looks> like a function, therefore it I<is> a
function, and precedence doesn't matter.  Otherwise it's a list
operator or unary operator, and precedence does matter.  And whitespace
between the function and left parenthesis doesn't count--so you need to
be careful sometimes:

    print 1+2+4;        # Prints 7.
    print(1+2) + 4;     # Prints 3.
    print (1+2)+4;      # Also prints 3!
    print +(1+2)+4;     # Prints 7.
    print ((1+2)+4);    # Prints 7.

If you run Perl with the B<-w> switch it can warn you about this.  For
example, the third line above produces:

    print (...) interpreted as function at - line 1.
    Useless use of integer addition in void context at - line 1.

A few functions take no arguments at all, and therefore work as neither
unary nor list operators.  These include such functions as C<time>
and C<endpwent>.  For example, C<time+86_400> always means
C<time() + 86_400>.

For functions that can be used in either a scalar or list context,
nonabortive failure is generally indicated in a scalar context by
returning the undefined value, and in a list context by returning the
null list.

Remember the following important rule: There is B<no rule> that relates
the behavior of an expression in list context to its behavior in scalar
context, or vice versa.  It might do two totally different things.
Each operator and function decides which sort of value it would be most
appropriate to return in scalar context.  Some operators return the
length of the list that would have been returned in list context.  Some
operators return the first value in the list.  Some operators return the
last value in the list.  Some operators return a count of successful
operations.  In general, they do what you want, unless you want
consistency.

A named array in scalar context is quite different from what would at
first glance appear to be a list in scalar context.  You can't get a list
like C<(1,2,3)> into being in scalar context, because the compiler knows
the context at compile time.  It would generate the scalar comma operator
there, not the list construction version of the comma.  That means it
was never a list to start with.

In general, functions in Perl that serve as wrappers for system calls
of the same name (like chown(2), fork(2), closedir(2), etc.) all return
true when they succeed and C<undef> otherwise, as is usually mentioned
in the descriptions below.  This is different from the C interfaces,
which return C<-1> on failure.  Exceptions to this rule are C<wait>,
C<waitpid>, and C<syscall>.  System calls also set the special C<$!>
variable on failure.  Other functions do not, except accidentally.

=head2 Perl Functions by Category

Here are Perl's functions (including things that look like
functions, like some keywords and named operators)
arranged by category.  Some functions appear in more
than one place.

=over 4

=item Functions for SCALARs or strings

C<chomp>, C<chop>, C<chr>, C<crypt>, C<hex>, C<index>, C<lc>, C<lcfirst>,
C<length>, C<oct>, C<ord>, C<pack>, C<q/STRING/>, C<qq/STRING/>, C<reverse>,
C<rindex>, C<sprintf>, C<substr>, C<tr///>, C<uc>, C<ucfirst>, C<y///>

=item Regular expressions and pattern matching

C<m//>, C<pos>, C<quotemeta>, C<s///>, C<split>, C<study>, C<qr//>

=item Numeric functions

C<abs>, C<atan2>, C<cos>, C<exp>, C<hex>, C<int>, C<log>, C<oct>, C<rand>,
C<sin>, C<sqrt>, C<srand>

=item Functions for real @ARRAYs

C<pop>, C<push>, C<shift>, C<splice>, C<unshift>

=item Functions for list data

C<grep>, C<join>, C<map>, C<qw/STRING/>, C<reverse>, C<sort>, C<unpack>

=item Functions for real %HASHes

C<delete>, C<each>, C<exists>, C<keys>, C<values>

=item Input and output functions

C<binmode>, C<close>, C<closedir>, C<dbmclose>, C<dbmopen>, C<die>, C<eof>,
C<fileno>, C<flock>, C<format>, C<getc>, C<print>, C<printf>, C<read>,
C<readdir>, C<rewinddir>, C<seek>, C<seekdir>, C<select>, C<syscall>,
C<sysread>, C<sysseek>, C<syswrite>, C<tell>, C<telldir>, C<truncate>,
C<warn>, C<write>

=item Functions for fixed length data or records

C<pack>, C<read>, C<syscall>, C<sysread>, C<syswrite>, C<unpack>, C<vec>

=item Functions for filehandles, files, or directories

C<-I<X>>, C<chdir>, C<chmod>, C<chown>, C<chroot>, C<fcntl>, C<glob>,
C<ioctl>, C<link>, C<lstat>, C<mkdir>, C<open>, C<opendir>,
C<readlink>, C<rename>, C<rmdir>, C<stat>, C<symlink>, C<sysopen>,
C<umask>, C<unlink>, C<utime>

=item Keywords related to the control flow of your perl program

C<caller>, C<continue>, C<die>, C<do>, C<dump>, C<eval>, C<exit>,
C<goto>, C<last>, C<next>, C<redo>, C<return>, C<sub>, C<wantarray>

=item Keywords related to scoping

C<caller>, C<import>, C<local>, C<my>, C<our>, C<package>, C<use>

=item Miscellaneous functions

C<defined>, C<dump>, C<eval>, C<formline>, C<local>, C<my>, C<our>, C<reset>,
C<scalar>, C<undef>, C<wantarray>

=item Functions for processes and process groups

C<alarm>, C<exec>, C<fork>, C<getpgrp>, C<getppid>, C<getpriority>, C<kill>,
C<pipe>, C<qx/STRING/>, C<setpgrp>, C<setpriority>, C<sleep>, C<system>,
C<times>, C<wait>, C<waitpid>

=item Keywords related to perl modules

C<do>, C<import>, C<no>, C<package>, C<require>, C<use>

=item Keywords related to classes and object-orientedness

C<bless>, C<dbmclose>, C<dbmopen>, C<package>, C<ref>, C<tie>, C<tied>,
C<untie>, C<use>

=item Low-level socket functions

C<accept>, C<bind>, C<connect>, C<getpeername>, C<getsockname>,
C<getsockopt>, C<listen>, C<recv>, C<send>, C<setsockopt>, C<shutdown>,
C<socket>, C<socketpair>

=item System V interprocess communication functions

C<msgctl>, C<msgget>, C<msgrcv>, C<msgsnd>, C<semctl>, C<semget>, C<semop>,
C<shmctl>, C<shmget>, C<shmread>, C<shmwrite>

=item Fetching user and group info

C<endgrent>, C<endhostent>, C<endnetent>, C<endpwent>, C<getgrent>,
C<getgrgid>, C<getgrnam>, C<getlogin>, C<getpwent>, C<getpwnam>,
C<getpwuid>, C<setgrent>, C<setpwent>

=item Fetching network info

C<endprotoent>, C<endservent>, C<gethostbyaddr>, C<gethostbyname>,
C<gethostent>, C<getnetbyaddr>, C<getnetbyname>, C<getnetent>,
C<getprotobyname>, C<getprotobynumber>, C<getprotoent>,
C<getservbyname>, C<getservbyport>, C<getservent>, C<sethostent>,
C<setnetent>, C<setprotoent>, C<setservent>

=item Time-related functions

C<gmtime>, C<localtime>, C<time>, C<times>

=item Functions new in perl5

C<abs>, C<bless>, C<chomp>, C<chr>, C<exists>, C<formline>, C<glob>,
C<import>, C<lc>, C<lcfirst>, C<map>, C<my>, C<no>, C<our>, C<prototype>,
C<qx>, C<qw>, C<readline>, C<readpipe>, C<ref>, C<sub*>, C<sysopen>, C<tie>,
C<tied>, C<uc>, C<ucfirst>, C<untie>, C<use>

* - C<sub> was a keyword in perl4, but in perl5 it is an
operator, which can be used in expressions.

=item Functions obsoleted in perl5

C<dbmclose>, C<dbmopen>

=back

=head2 Portability

Perl was born in Unix and can therefore access all common Unix
system calls.  In non-Unix environments, the functionality of some
Unix system calls may not be available, or details of the available
functionality may differ slightly.  The Perl functions affected
by this are:

C<-X>, C<binmode>, C<chmod>, C<chown>, C<chroot>, C<crypt>,
C<dbmclose>, C<dbmopen>, C<dump>, C<endgrent>, C<endhostent>,
C<endnetent>, C<endprotoent>, C<endpwent>, C<endservent>, C<exec>,
C<fcntl>, C<flock>, C<fork>, C<getgrent>, C<getgrgid>, C<gethostbyname>,
C<gethostent>, C<getlogin>, C<getnetbyaddr>, C<getnetbyname>, C<getnetent>,
C<getppid>, C<getprgp>, C<getpriority>, C<getprotobynumber>,
C<getprotoent>, C<getpwent>, C<getpwnam>, C<getpwuid>,
C<getservbyport>, C<getservent>, C<getsockopt>, C<glob>, C<ioctl>,
C<kill>, C<link>, C<lstat>, C<msgctl>, C<msgget>, C<msgrcv>,
C<msgsnd>, C<open>, C<pipe>, C<readlink>, C<rename>, C<select>, C<semctl>,
C<semget>, C<semop>, C<setgrent>, C<sethostent>, C<setnetent>,
C<setpgrp>, C<setpriority>, C<setprotoent>, C<setpwent>,
C<setservent>, C<setsockopt>, C<shmctl>, C<shmget>, C<shmread>,
C<shmwrite>, C<socket>, C<socketpair>,
C<stat>, C<symlink>, C<syscall>, C<sysopen>, C<system>,
C<times>, C<truncate>, C<umask>, C<unlink>,
C<utime>, C<wait>, C<waitpid>

For more information about the portability of these functions, see
L<perlport> and other available platform-specific documentation.

=head2 Alphabetical Listing of Perl Functions

=over 8

=item -X FILEHANDLE

=item -X EXPR

=item -X

A file test, where X is one of the letters listed below.  This unary
operator takes one argument, either a filename or a filehandle, and
tests the associated file to see if something is true about it.  If the
argument is omitted, tests C<$_>, except for C<-t>, which tests STDIN.
Unless otherwise documented, it returns C<1> for true and C<''> for false, or
the undefined value if the file doesn't exist.  Despite the funny
names, precedence is the same as any other named unary operator, and
the argument may be parenthesized like any other unary operator.  The
operator may be any of:
X<-r>X<-w>X<-x>X<-o>X<-R>X<-W>X<-X>X<-O>X<-e>X<-z>X<-s>X<-f>X<-d>X<-l>X<-p>
X<-S>X<-b>X<-c>X<-t>X<-u>X<-g>X<-k>X<-T>X<-B>X<-M>X<-A>X<-C>

    -r  File is readable by effective uid/gid.
    -w  File is writable by effective uid/gid.
    -x  File is executable by effective uid/gid.
    -o  File is owned by effective uid.

    -R  File is readable by real uid/gid.
    -W  File is writable by real uid/gid.
    -X  File is executable by real uid/gid.
    -O  File is owned by real uid.

    -e  File exists.
    -z  File has zero size (is empty).
    -s  File has nonzero size (returns size in bytes).

    -f  File is a plain file.
    -d  File is a directory.
    -l  File is a symbolic link.
    -p  File is a named pipe (FIFO), or Filehandle is a pipe.
    -S  File is a socket.
    -b  File is a block special file.
    -c  File is a character special file.
    -t  Filehandle is opened to a tty.

    -u  File has setuid bit set.
    -g  File has setgid bit set.
    -k  File has sticky bit set.

    -T  File is an ASCII text file (heuristic guess).
    -B  File is a "binary" file (opposite of -T).

    -M  Script start time minus file modification time, in days.
    -A  Same for access time.
    -C  Same for inode change time (Unix, may differ for other platforms)

Example:

    while (<>) {
        chomp;
        next unless -f $_;      # ignore specials
        #...
    }

The interpretation of the file permission operators C<-r>, C<-R>,
C<-w>, C<-W>, C<-x>, and C<-X> is by default based solely on the mode
of the file and the uids and gids of the user.  There may be other
reasons you can't actually read, write, or execute the file.  Such
reasons may be for example network filesystem access controls, ACLs
(access control lists), read-only filesystems, and unrecognized
executable formats.

Also note that, for the superuser on the local filesystems, the C<-r>,
C<-R>, C<-w>, and C<-W> tests always return 1, and C<-x> and C<-X> return 1
if any execute bit is set in the mode.  Scripts run by the superuser
may thus need to do a stat() to determine the actual mode of the file,
or temporarily set their effective uid to something else.

If you are using ACLs, there is a pragma called C<filetest> that may
produce more accurate results than the bare stat() mode bits.
When under the C<use filetest 'access'> the above-mentioned filetests
will test whether the permission can (not) be granted using the
access() family of system calls.  Also note that the C<-x> and C<-X> may
under this pragma return true even if there are no execute permission
bits set (nor any extra execute permission ACLs).  This strangeness is
due to the underlying system calls' definitions.  Read the
documentation for the C<filetest> pragma for more information.

Note that C<-s/a/b/> does not do a negated substitution.  Saying
C<-exp($foo)> still works as expected, however--only single letters
following a minus are interpreted as file tests.

The C<-T> and C<-B> switches work as follows.  The first block or so of the
file is examined for odd characters such as strange control codes or
characters with the high bit set.  If too many strange characters (>30%)
are found, it's a C<-B> file, otherwise it's a C<-T> file.  Also, any file
containing null in the first block is considered a binary file.  If C<-T>
or C<-B> is used on a filehandle, the current IO buffer is examined
rather than the first block.  Both C<-T> and C<-B> return true on a null
file, or a file at EOF when testing a filehandle.  Because you have to
read a file to do the C<-T> test, on most occasions you want to use a C<-f>
against the file first, as in C<next unless -f $file && -T $file>.

If any of the file tests (or either the C<stat> or C<lstat> operators) are given
the special filehandle consisting of a solitary underline, then the stat
structure of the previous file test (or stat operator) is used, saving
a system call.  (This doesn't work with C<-t>, and you need to remember
that lstat() and C<-l> will leave values in the stat structure for the
symbolic link, not the real file.)  (Also, if the stat buffer was filled by
a C<lstat> call, C<-T> and C<-B> will reset it with the results of C<stat _>).
Example:

    print "Can do.\n" if -r $a || -w _ || -x _;

    stat($filename);
    print "Readable\n" if -r _;
    print "Writable\n" if -w _;
    print "Executable\n" if -x _;
    print "Setuid\n" if -u _;
    print "Setgid\n" if -g _;
    print "Sticky\n" if -k _;
    print "Text\n" if -T _;
    print "Binary\n" if -B _;

As of Perl 5.9.1, as a form of purely syntactic sugar, you can stack file
test operators, in a way that C<-f -w -x $file> is equivalent to
C<-x $file && -w _ && -f _>. (This is only syntax fancy : if you use
the return value of C<-f $file> as an argument to another filetest
operator, no special magic will happen.)

=item abs VALUE

=item abs

Returns the absolute value of its argument.
If VALUE is omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item accept NEWSOCKET,GENERICSOCKET

Accepts an incoming socket connect, just as the accept(2) system call
does.  Returns the packed address if it succeeded, false otherwise.
See the example in L<perlipc/"Sockets: Client/Server Communication">.

On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will
be set for the newly opened file descriptor, as determined by the
value of $^F.  See L<perlvar/$^F>.

=item alarm SECONDS

=item alarm

Arranges to have a SIGALRM delivered to this process after the
specified number of wallclock seconds have elapsed.  If SECONDS is not
specified, the value stored in C<$_> is used. (On some machines,
unfortunately, the elapsed time may be up to one second less or more
than you specified because of how seconds are counted, and process
scheduling may delay the delivery of the signal even further.)

Only one timer may be counting at once.  Each call disables the
previous timer, and an argument of C<0> may be supplied to cancel the
previous timer without starting a new one.  The returned value is the
amount of time remaining on the previous timer.

For delays of finer granularity than one second, you may use Perl's
four-argument version of select() leaving the first three arguments
undefined, or you might be able to use the C<syscall> interface to
access setitimer(2) if your system supports it.  The Time::HiRes
module (from CPAN, and starting from Perl 5.8 part of the standard
distribution) may also prove useful.

It is usually a mistake to intermix C<alarm> and C<sleep> calls.
(C<sleep> may be internally implemented in your system with C<alarm>)

If you want to use C<alarm> to time out a system call you need to use an
C<eval>/C<die> pair.  You can't rely on the alarm causing the system call to
fail with C<$!> set to C<EINTR> because Perl sets up signal handlers to
restart system calls on some systems.  Using C<eval>/C<die> always works,
modulo the caveats given in L<perlipc/"Signals">.

    eval {
        local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" }; # NB: \n required
        alarm $timeout;
        $nread = sysread SOCKET, $buffer, $size;
        alarm 0;
    };
    if ($@) {
        die unless $@ eq "alarm\n";   # propagate unexpected errors
        # timed out
    }
    else {
        # didn't
    }

For more information see L<perlipc>.

=item atan2 Y,X

Returns the arctangent of Y/X in the range -PI to PI.

For the tangent operation, you may use the C<Math::Trig::tan>
function, or use the familiar relation:

    sub tan { sin($_[0]) / cos($_[0])  }

=item bind SOCKET,NAME

Binds a network address to a socket, just as the bind system call
does.  Returns true if it succeeded, false otherwise.  NAME should be a
packed address of the appropriate type for the socket.  See the examples in
L<perlipc/"Sockets: Client/Server Communication">.

=item binmode FILEHANDLE, LAYER

=item binmode FILEHANDLE

Arranges for FILEHANDLE to be read or written in "binary" or "text"
mode on systems where the run-time libraries distinguish between
binary and text files.  If FILEHANDLE is an expression, the value is
taken as the name of the filehandle.  Returns true on success,
otherwise it returns C<undef> and sets C<$!> (errno).

On some systems (in general, DOS and Windows-based systems) binmode()
is necessary when you're not working with a text file.  For the sake
of portability it is a good idea to always use it when appropriate,
and to never use it when it isn't appropriate.  Also, people can
set their I/O to be by default UTF-8 encoded Unicode, not bytes.

In other words: regardless of platform, use binmode() on binary data,
like for example images.

If LAYER is present it is a single string, but may contain multiple
directives. The directives alter the behaviour of the file handle.
When LAYER is present using binmode on text file makes sense.

If LAYER is omitted or specified as C<:raw> the filehandle is made
suitable for passing binary data. This includes turning off possible CRLF
translation and marking it as bytes (as opposed to Unicode characters).
Note that, despite what may be implied in I<"Programming Perl"> (the
Camel) or elsewhere, C<:raw> is I<not> the simply inverse of C<:crlf>
-- other layers which would affect binary nature of the stream are
I<also> disabled. See L<PerlIO>, L<perlrun> and the discussion about the
PERLIO environment variable.

The C<:bytes>, C<:crlf>, and C<:utf8>, and any other directives of the
form C<:...>, are called I/O I<layers>.  The C<open> pragma can be used to
establish default I/O layers.  See L<open>.

I<The LAYER parameter of the binmode() function is described as "DISCIPLINE"
in "Programming Perl, 3rd Edition".  However, since the publishing of this
book, by many known as "Camel III", the consensus of the naming of this
functionality has moved from "discipline" to "layer".  All documentation
of this version of Perl therefore refers to "layers" rather than to
"disciplines".  Now back to the regularly scheduled documentation...>

To mark FILEHANDLE as UTF-8, use C<:utf8>.

In general, binmode() should be called after open() but before any I/O
is done on the filehandle.  Calling binmode() will normally flush any
pending buffered output data (and perhaps pending input data) on the
handle.  An exception to this is the C<:encoding> layer that
changes the default character encoding of the handle, see L<open>.
The C<:encoding> layer sometimes needs to be called in
mid-stream, and it doesn't flush the stream.  The C<:encoding>
also implicitly pushes on top of itself the C<:utf8> layer because
internally Perl will operate on UTF-8 encoded Unicode characters.

The operating system, device drivers, C libraries, and Perl run-time
system all work together to let the programmer treat a single
character (C<\n>) as the line terminator, irrespective of the external
representation.  On many operating systems, the native text file
representation matches the internal representation, but on some
platforms the external representation of C<\n> is made up of more than
one character.

Mac OS, all variants of Unix, and Stream_LF files on VMS use a single
character to end each line in the external representation of text (even
though that single character is CARRIAGE RETURN on Mac OS and LINE FEED
on Unix and most VMS files). In other systems like OS/2, DOS and the
various flavors of MS-Windows your program sees a C<\n> as a simple C<\cJ>,
but what's stored in text files are the two characters C<\cM\cJ>.  That
means that, if you don't use binmode() on these systems, C<\cM\cJ>
sequences on disk will be converted to C<\n> on input, and any C<\n> in
your program will be converted back to C<\cM\cJ> on output.  This is what
you want for text files, but it can be disastrous for binary files.

Another consequence of using binmode() (on some systems) is that
special end-of-file markers will be seen as part of the data stream.
For systems from the Microsoft family this means that if your binary
data contains C<\cZ>, the I/O subsystem will regard it as the end of
the file, unless you use binmode().

binmode() is not only important for readline() and print() operations,
but also when using read(), seek(), sysread(), syswrite() and tell()
(see L<perlport> for more details).  See the C<$/> and C<$\> variables
in L<perlvar> for how to manually set your input and output
line-termination sequences.

=item bless REF,CLASSNAME

=item bless REF

This function tells the thingy referenced by REF that it is now an object
in the CLASSNAME package.  If CLASSNAME is omitted, the current package
is used.  Because a C<bless> is often the last thing in a constructor,
it returns the reference for convenience.  Always use the two-argument
version if the function doing the blessing might be inherited by a
derived class.  See L<perltoot> and L<perlobj> for more about the blessing
(and blessings) of objects.

Consider always blessing objects in CLASSNAMEs that are mixed case.
Namespaces with all lowercase names are considered reserved for
Perl pragmata.  Builtin types have all uppercase names, so to prevent
confusion, you may wish to avoid such package names as well.  Make sure
that CLASSNAME is a true value.

See L<perlmod/"Perl Modules">.

=item caller EXPR

=item caller

Returns the context of the current subroutine call.  In scalar context,
returns the caller's package name if there is a caller, that is, if
we're in a subroutine or C<eval> or C<require>, and the undefined value
otherwise.  In list context, returns

    ($package, $filename, $line) = caller;

With EXPR, it returns some extra information that the debugger uses to
print a stack trace.  The value of EXPR indicates how many call frames
to go back before the current one.

    ($package, $filename, $line, $subroutine, $hasargs,
    $wantarray, $evaltext, $is_require, $hints, $bitmask) = caller($i);

Here $subroutine may be C<(eval)> if the frame is not a subroutine
call, but an C<eval>.  In such a case additional elements $evaltext and
C<$is_require> are set: C<$is_require> is true if the frame is created by a
C<require> or C<use> statement, $evaltext contains the text of the
C<eval EXPR> statement.  In particular, for an C<eval BLOCK> statement,
$filename is C<(eval)>, but $evaltext is undefined.  (Note also that
each C<use> statement creates a C<require> frame inside an C<eval EXPR>
frame.)  $subroutine may also be C<(unknown)> if this particular
subroutine happens to have been deleted from the symbol table.
C<$hasargs> is true if a new instance of C<@_> was set up for the frame.
C<$hints> and C<$bitmask> contain pragmatic hints that the caller was
compiled with.  The C<$hints> and C<$bitmask> values are subject to change
between versions of Perl, and are not meant for external use.

Furthermore, when called from within the DB package, caller returns more
detailed information: it sets the list variable C<@DB::args> to be the
arguments with which the subroutine was invoked.

Be aware that the optimizer might have optimized call frames away before
C<caller> had a chance to get the information.  That means that C<caller(N)>
might not return information about the call frame you expect it do, for
C<< N > 1 >>.  In particular, C<@DB::args> might have information from the
previous time C<caller> was called.

=item chdir EXPR

Changes the working directory to EXPR, if possible. If EXPR is omitted,
changes to the directory specified by C<$ENV{HOME}>, if set; if not,
changes to the directory specified by C<$ENV{LOGDIR}>. (Under VMS, the
variable C<$ENV{SYS$LOGIN}> is also checked, and used if it is set.) If
neither is set, C<chdir> does nothing. It returns true upon success,
false otherwise. See the example under C<die>.

=item chmod LIST

Changes the permissions of a list of files.  The first element of the
list must be the numerical mode, which should probably be an octal
number, and which definitely should I<not> be a string of octal digits:
C<0644> is okay, C<'0644'> is not.  Returns the number of files
successfully changed.  See also L</oct>, if all you have is a string.

    $cnt = chmod 0755, 'foo', 'bar';
    chmod 0755, @executables;
    $mode = '0644'; chmod $mode, 'foo';      # !!! sets mode to
                                             # --w----r-T
    $mode = '0644'; chmod oct($mode), 'foo'; # this is better
    $mode = 0644;   chmod $mode, 'foo';      # this is best

You can also import the symbolic C<S_I*> constants from the Fcntl
module:

    use Fcntl ':mode';

    chmod S_IRWXU|S_IRGRP|S_IXGRP|S_IROTH|S_IXOTH, @executables;
    # This is identical to the chmod 0755 of the above example.

=item chomp VARIABLE

=item chomp( LIST )

=item chomp

This safer version of L</chop> removes any trailing string
that corresponds to the current value of C<$/> (also known as
$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the C<English> module).  It returns the total
number of characters removed from all its arguments.  It's often used to
remove the newline from the end of an input record when you're worried
that the final record may be missing its newline.  When in paragraph
mode (C<$/ = "">), it removes all trailing newlines from the string.
When in slurp mode (C<$/ = undef>) or fixed-length record mode (C<$/> is
a reference to an integer or the like, see L<perlvar>) chomp() won't
remove anything.
If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps C<$_>.  Example:

    while (<>) {
        chomp;  # avoid \n on last field
        @array = split(/:/);
        # ...
    }

If VARIABLE is a hash, it chomps the hash's values, but not its keys.

You can actually chomp anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment:

    chomp($cwd = `pwd`);
    chomp($answer = <STDIN>);

If you chomp a list, each element is chomped, and the total number of
characters removed is returned.

If the C<encoding> pragma is in scope then the lengths returned are
calculated from the length of C<$/> in Unicode characters, which is not
always the same as the length of C<$/> in the native encoding.

Note that parentheses are necessary when you're chomping anything
that is not a simple variable.  This is because C<chomp $cwd = `pwd`;>
is interpreted as C<(chomp $cwd) = `pwd`;>, rather than as
C<chomp( $cwd = `pwd` )> which you might expect.  Similarly,
C<chomp $a, $b> is interpreted as C<chomp($a), $b> rather than
as C<chomp($a, $b)>.

=item chop VARIABLE

=item chop( LIST )

=item chop

Chops off the last character of a string and returns the character
chopped.  It is much more efficient than C<s/.$//s> because it neither
scans nor copies the string.  If VARIABLE is omitted, chops C<$_>.
If VARIABLE is a hash, it chops the hash's values, but not its keys.

You can actually chop anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment.

If you chop a list, each element is chopped.  Only the value of the
last C<chop> is returned.

Note that C<chop> returns the last character.  To return all but the last
character, use C<substr($string, 0, -1)>.

See also L</chomp>.

=item chown LIST

Changes the owner (and group) of a list of files.  The first two
elements of the list must be the I<numeric> uid and gid, in that
order.  A value of -1 in either position is interpreted by most
systems to leave that value unchanged.  Returns the number of files
successfully changed.

    $cnt = chown $uid, $gid, 'foo', 'bar';
    chown $uid, $gid, @filenames;

Here's an example that looks up nonnumeric uids in the passwd file:

    print "User: ";
    chomp($user = <STDIN>);
    print "Files: ";
    chomp($pattern = <STDIN>);

    ($login,$pass,$uid,$gid) = getpwnam($user)
        or die "$user not in passwd file";

    @ary = glob($pattern);      # expand filenames
    chown $uid, $gid, @ary;

On most systems, you are not allowed to change the ownership of the
file unless you're the superuser, although you should be able to change
the group to any of your secondary groups.  On insecure systems, these
restrictions may be relaxed, but this is not a portable assumption.
On POSIX systems, you can detect this condition this way:

    use POSIX qw(sysconf _PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED);
    $can_chown_giveaway = not sysconf(_PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED);

=item chr NUMBER

=item chr

Returns the character represented by that NUMBER in the character set.
For example, C<chr(65)> is C<"A"> in either ASCII or Unicode, and
chr(0x263a) is a Unicode smiley face.  Note that characters from 128
to 255 (inclusive) are by default not encoded in UTF-8 Unicode for
backward compatibility reasons (but see L<encoding>).

If NUMBER is omitted, uses C<$_>.

For the reverse, use L</ord>.

Note that under the C<bytes> pragma the NUMBER is masked to
the low eight bits.

See L<perlunicode> and L<encoding> for more about Unicode.

=item chroot FILENAME

=item chroot

This function works like the system call by the same name: it makes the
named directory the new root directory for all further pathnames that
begin with a C</> by your process and all its children.  (It doesn't
change your current working directory, which is unaffected.)  For security
reasons, this call is restricted to the superuser.  If FILENAME is
omitted, does a C<chroot> to C<$_>.

=item close FILEHANDLE

=item close

Closes the file or pipe associated with the file handle, returning
true only if IO buffers are successfully flushed and closes the system
file descriptor.  Closes the currently selected filehandle if the
argument is omitted.

You don't have to close FILEHANDLE if you are immediately going to do
another C<open> on it, because C<open> will close it for you.  (See
C<open>.)  However, an explicit C<close> on an input file resets the line
counter (C<$.>), while the implicit close done by C<open> does not.

If the file handle came from a piped open, C<close> will additionally
return false if one of the other system calls involved fails, or if the
program exits with non-zero status.  (If the only problem was that the
program exited non-zero, C<$!> will be set to C<0>.)  Closing a pipe
also waits for the process executing on the pipe to complete, in case you
want to look at the output of the pipe afterwards, and
implicitly puts the exit status value of that command into C<$?>.

Prematurely closing the read end of a pipe (i.e. before the process
writing to it at the other end has closed it) will result in a
SIGPIPE being delivered to the writer.  If the other end can't
handle that, be sure to read all the data before closing the pipe.

Example:

    open(OUTPUT, '|sort >foo')  # pipe to sort
        or die "Can't start sort: $!";
    #...                        # print stuff to output
    close OUTPUT                # wait for sort to finish
        or warn $! ? "Error closing sort pipe: $!"
                   : "Exit status $? from sort";
    open(INPUT, 'foo')          # get sort's results
        or die "Can't open 'foo' for input: $!";

FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value can be used as an indirect
filehandle, usually the real filehandle name.

=item closedir DIRHANDLE

Closes a directory opened by C<opendir> and returns the success of that
system call.

=item connect SOCKET,NAME

Attempts to connect to a remote socket, just as the connect system call
does.  Returns true if it succeeded, false otherwise.  NAME should be a
packed address of the appropriate type for the socket.  See the examples in
L<perlipc/"Sockets: Client/Server Communication">.

=item continue BLOCK

Actually a flow control statement rather than a function.  If there is a
C<continue> BLOCK attached to a BLOCK (typically in a C<while> or
C<foreach>), it is always executed just before the conditional is about to
be evaluated again, just like the third part of a C<for> loop in C.  Thus
it can be used to increment a loop variable, even when the loop has been
continued via the C<next> statement (which is similar to the C C<continue>
statement).

C<last>, C<next>, or C<redo> may appear within a C<continue>
block.  C<last> and C<redo> will behave as if they had been executed within
the main block.  So will C<next>, but since it will execute a C<continue>
block, it may be more entertaining.

    while (EXPR) {
        ### redo always comes here
        do_something;
    } continue {
        ### next always comes here
        do_something_else;
        # then back the top to re-check EXPR
    }
    ### last always comes here

Omitting the C<continue> section is semantically equivalent to using an
empty one, logically enough.  In that case, C<next> goes directly back
to check the condition at the top of the loop.

=item cos EXPR

=item cos

Returns the cosine of EXPR (expressed in radians).  If EXPR is omitted,
takes cosine of C<$_>.

For the inverse cosine operation, you may use the C<Math::Trig::acos()>
function, or use this relation:

    sub acos { atan2( sqrt(1 - $_[0] * $_[0]), $_[0] ) }

=item crypt PLAINTEXT,SALT

Encrypts a string exactly like the crypt(3) function in the C library
(assuming that you actually have a version there that has not been
extirpated as a potential munition).  This can prove useful for checking
the password file for lousy passwords, amongst other things.  Only the
guys wearing white hats should do this.

Note that L<crypt|/crypt> is intended to be a one-way function, much like
breaking eggs to make an omelette.  There is no (known) corresponding
decrypt function (in other words, the crypt() is a one-way hash
function).  As a result, this function isn't all that useful for
cryptography.  (For that, see your nearby CPAN mirror.)

When verifying an existing encrypted string you should use the
encrypted text as the salt (like C<crypt($plain, $crypted) eq
$crypted>).  This allows your code to work with the standard L<crypt|/crypt>
and with more exotic implementations.  In other words, do not assume
anything about the returned string itself, or how many bytes in
the encrypted string matter.

Traditionally the result is a string of 13 bytes: two first bytes of
the salt, followed by 11 bytes from the set C<[./0-9A-Za-z]>, and only
the first eight bytes of the encrypted string mattered, but
alternative hashing schemes (like MD5), higher level security schemes
(like C2), and implementations on non-UNIX platforms may produce
different strings.

When choosing a new salt create a random two character string whose
characters come from the set C<[./0-9A-Za-z]> (like C<join '', ('.',
'/', 0..9, 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z')[rand 64, rand 64]>).  This set of
characters is just a recommendation; the characters allowed in
the salt depend solely on your system's crypt library, and Perl can't
restrict what salts C<crypt()> accepts.

Here's an example that makes sure that whoever runs this program knows
their own password:

    $pwd = (getpwuid($<))[1];

    system "stty -echo";
    print "Password: ";
    chomp($word = <STDIN>);
    print "\n";
    system "stty echo";

    if (crypt($word, $pwd) ne $pwd) {
        die "Sorry...\n";
    } else {
        print "ok\n";
    }

Of course, typing in your own password to whoever asks you
for it is unwise.

The L<crypt|/crypt> function is unsuitable for encrypting large quantities
of data, not least of all because you can't get the information
back.  Look at the F<by-module/Crypt> and F<by-module/PGP> directories
on your favorite CPAN mirror for a slew of potentially useful
modules.

If using crypt() on a Unicode string (which I<potentially> has
characters with codepoints above 255), Perl tries to make sense
of the situation by trying to downgrade (a copy of the string)
the string back to an eight-bit byte string before calling crypt()
(on that copy).  If that works, good.  If not, crypt() dies with
C<Wide character in crypt>.

=item dbmclose HASH

[This function has been largely superseded by the C<untie> function.]

Breaks the binding between a DBM file and a hash.

=item dbmopen HASH,DBNAME,MASK

[This function has been largely superseded by the C<tie> function.]

This binds a dbm(3), ndbm(3), sdbm(3), gdbm(3), or Berkeley DB file to a
hash.  HASH is the name of the hash.  (Unlike normal C<open>, the first
argument is I<not> a filehandle, even though it looks like one).  DBNAME
is the name of the database (without the F<.dir> or F<.pag> extension if
any).  If the database does not exist, it is created with protection
specified by MASK (as modified by the C<umask>).  If your system supports
only the older DBM functions, you may perform only one C<dbmopen> in your
program.  In older versions of Perl, if your system had neither DBM nor
ndbm, calling C<dbmopen> produced a fatal error; it now falls back to
sdbm(3).

If you don't have write access to the DBM file, you can only read hash
variables, not set them.  If you want to test whether you can write,
either use file tests or try setting a dummy hash entry inside an C<eval>,
which will trap the error.

Note that functions such as C<keys> and C<values> may return huge lists
when used on large DBM files.  You may prefer to use the C<each>
function to iterate over large DBM files.  Example:

    # print out history file offsets
    dbmopen(%HIST,'/usr/lib/news/history',0666);
    while (($key,$val) = each %HIST) {
        print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n";
    }
    dbmclose(%HIST);

See also L<AnyDBM_File> for a more general description of the pros and
cons of the various dbm approaches, as well as L<DB_File> for a particularly
rich implementation.

You can control which DBM library you use by loading that library
before you call dbmopen():

    use DB_File;
    dbmopen(%NS_Hist, "$ENV{HOME}/.netscape/history.db")
        or die "Can't open netscape history file: $!";

=item defined EXPR

=item defined

Returns a Boolean value telling whether EXPR has a value other than
the undefined value C<undef>.  If EXPR is not present, C<$_> will be
checked.

Many operations return C<undef> to indicate failure, end of file,
system error, uninitialized variable, and other exceptional
conditions.  This function allows you to distinguish C<undef> from
other values.  (A simple Boolean test will not distinguish among
C<undef>, zero, the empty string, and C<"0">, which are all equally
false.)  Note that since C<undef> is a valid scalar, its presence
doesn't I<necessarily> indicate an exceptional condition: C<pop>
returns C<undef> when its argument is an empty array, I<or> when the
element to return happens to be C<undef>.

You may also use C<defined(&func)> to check whether subroutine C<&func>
has ever been defined.  The return value is unaffected by any forward
declarations of C<&func>.  Note that a subroutine which is not defined
may still be callable: its package may have an C<AUTOLOAD> method that
makes it spring into existence the first time that it is called -- see
L<perlsub>.

Use of C<defined> on aggregates (hashes and arrays) is deprecated.  It
used to report whether memory for that aggregate has ever been
allocated.  This behavior may disappear in future versions of Perl.
You should instead use a simple test for size:

    if (@an_array) { print "has array elements\n" }
    if (%a_hash)   { print "has hash members\n"   }

When used on a hash element, it tells you whether the value is defined,
not whether the key exists in the hash.  Use L</exists> for the latter
purpose.

Examples:

    print if defined $switch{'D'};
    print "$val\n" while defined($val = pop(@ary));
    die "Can't readlink $sym: $!"
        unless defined($value = readlink $sym);
    sub foo { defined &$bar ? &$bar(@_) : die "No bar"; }
    $debugging = 0 unless defined $debugging;

Note:  Many folks tend to overuse C<defined>, and then are surprised to
discover that the number C<0> and C<""> (the zero-length string) are, in fact,
defined values.  For example, if you say

    "ab" =~ /a(.*)b/;

The pattern match succeeds, and C<$1> is defined, despite the fact that it
matched "nothing".  But it didn't really match nothing--rather, it
matched something that happened to be zero characters long.  This is all
very above-board and honest.  When a function returns an undefined value,
it's an admission that it couldn't give you an honest answer.  So you
should use C<defined> only when you're questioning the integrity of what
you're trying to do.  At other times, a simple comparison to C<0> or C<""> is
what you want.

See also L</undef>, L</exists>, L</ref>.

=item delete EXPR

Given an expression that specifies a hash element, array element, hash slice,
or array slice, deletes the specified element(s) from the hash or array.
In the case of an array, if the array elements happen to be at the end,
the size of the array will shrink to the highest element that tests
true for exists() (or 0 if no such element exists).

Returns a list with the same number of elements as the number of elements
for which deletion was attempted.  Each element of that list consists of
either the value of the element deleted, or the undefined value.  In scalar
context, this means that you get the value of the last element deleted (or
the undefined value if that element did not exist).

    %hash = (foo => 11, bar => 22, baz => 33);
    $scalar = delete $hash{foo};             # $scalar is 11
    $scalar = delete @hash{qw(foo bar)};     # $scalar is 22
    @array  = delete @hash{qw(foo bar baz)}; # @array  is (undef,undef,33)

Deleting from C<%ENV> modifies the environment.  Deleting from
a hash tied to a DBM file deletes the entry from the DBM file.  Deleting
from a C<tie>d hash or array may not necessarily return anything.

Deleting an array element effectively returns that position of the array
to its initial, uninitialized state.  Subsequently testing for the same
element with exists() will return false.  Note that deleting array
elements in the middle of an array will not shift the index of the ones
after them down--use splice() for that.  See L</exists>.

The following (inefficiently) deletes all the values of %HASH and @ARRAY:

    foreach $key (keys %HASH) {
        delete $HASH{$key};
    }

    foreach $index (0 .. $#ARRAY) {
        delete $ARRAY[$index];
    }

And so do these:

    delete @HASH{keys %HASH};

    delete @ARRAY[0 .. $#ARRAY];

But both of these are slower than just assigning the empty list
or undefining %HASH or @ARRAY:

    %HASH = ();         # completely empty %HASH
    undef %HASH;        # forget %HASH ever existed

    @ARRAY = ();        # completely empty @ARRAY
    undef @ARRAY;       # forget @ARRAY ever existed

Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final
operation is a hash element, array element,  hash slice, or array slice
lookup:

    delete $ref->[$x][$y]{$key};
    delete @{$ref->[$x][$y]}{$key1, $key2, @morekeys};

    delete $ref->[$x][$y][$index];
    delete @{$ref->[$x][$y]}[$index1, $index2, @moreindices];

=item die LIST

Outside an C<eval>, prints the value of LIST to C<STDERR> and
exits with the current value of C<$!> (errno).  If C<$!> is C<0>,
exits with the value of C<<< ($? >> 8) >>> (backtick `command`
status).  If C<<< ($? >> 8) >>> is C<0>, exits with C<255>.  Inside
an C<eval(),> the error message is stuffed into C<$@> and the
C<eval> is terminated with the undefined value.  This makes
C<die> the way to raise an exception.

Equivalent examples:

    die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n" unless chdir '/usr/spool/news';
    chdir '/usr/spool/news' or die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n"

If the last element of LIST does not end in a newline, the current
script line number and input line number (if any) are also printed,
and a newline is supplied.  Note that the "input line number" (also
known as "chunk") is subject to whatever notion of "line" happens to
be currently in effect, and is also available as the special variable
C<$.>.  See L<perlvar/"$/"> and L<perlvar/"$.">.

Hint: sometimes appending C<", stopped"> to your message will cause it
to make better sense when the string C<"at foo line 123"> is appended.
Suppose you are running script "canasta".

    die "/etc/games is no good";
    die "/etc/games is no good, stopped";

produce, respectively

    /etc/games is no good at canasta line 123.
    /etc/games is no good, stopped at canasta line 123.

See also exit(), warn(), and the Carp module.

If LIST is empty and C<$@> already contains a value (typically from a
previous eval) that value is reused after appending C<"\t...propagated">.
This is useful for propagating exceptions:

    eval { ... };
    die unless $@ =~ /Expected exception/;

If LIST is empty and C<$@> contains an object reference that has a
C<PROPAGATE> method, that method will be called with additional file
and line number parameters.  The return value replaces the value in
C<$@>.  ie. as if C<< $@ = eval { $@->PROPAGATE(__FILE__, __LINE__) }; >>
were called.

If C<$@> is empty then the string C<"Died"> is used.

die() can also be called with a reference argument.  If this happens to be
trapped within an eval(), $@ contains the reference.  This behavior permits
a more elaborate exception handling implementation using objects that
maintain arbitrary state about the nature of the exception.  Such a scheme
is sometimes preferable to matching particular string values of $@ using
regular expressions.  Here's an example:

    eval { ... ; die Some::Module::Exception->new( FOO => "bar" ) };
    if ($@) {
        if (ref($@) && UNIVERSAL::isa($@,"Some::Module::Exception")) {
            # handle Some::Module::Exception
        }
        else {
            # handle all other possible exceptions
        }
    }

Because perl will stringify uncaught exception messages before displaying
them, you may want to overload stringification operations on such custom
exception objects.  See L<overload> for details about that.

You can arrange for a callback to be run just before the C<die>
does its deed, by setting the C<$SIG{__DIE__}> hook.  The associated
handler will be called with the error text and can change the error
message, if it sees fit, by calling C<die> again.  See
L<perlvar/$SIG{expr}> for details on setting C<%SIG> entries, and
L<"eval BLOCK"> for some examples.  Although this feature was meant
to be run only right before your program was to exit, this is not
currently the case--the C<$SIG{__DIE__}> hook is currently called
even inside eval()ed blocks/strings!  If one wants the hook to do
nothing in such situations, put

        die @_ if $^S;

as the first line of the handler (see L<perlvar/$^S>).  Because
this promotes strange action at a distance, this counterintuitive
behavior may be fixed in a future release.

=item do BLOCK

Not really a function.  Returns the value of the last command in the
sequence of commands indicated by BLOCK.  When modified by a loop
modifier, executes the BLOCK once before testing the loop condition.
(On other statements the loop modifiers test the conditional first.)

C<do BLOCK> does I<not> count as a loop, so the loop control statements
C<next>, C<last>, or C<redo> cannot be used to leave or restart the block.
See L<perlsyn> for alternative strategies.

=item do SUBROUTINE(LIST)

A deprecated form of subroutine call.  See L<perlsub>.

=item do EXPR

Uses the value of EXPR as a filename and executes the contents of the
file as a Perl script.

    do 'stat.pl';

is just like

    eval `cat stat.pl`;

except that it's more efficient and concise, keeps track of the current
filename for error messages, searches the @INC directories, and updates
C<%INC> if the file is found.  See L<perlvar/Predefined Names> for these
variables.  It also differs in that code evaluated with C<do FILENAME>
cannot see lexicals in the enclosing scope; C<eval STRING> does.  It's the
same, however, in that it does reparse the file every time you call it,
so you probably don't want to do this inside a loop.

If C<do> cannot read the file, it returns undef and sets C<$!> to the
error.  If C<do> can read the file but cannot compile it, it
returns undef and sets an error message in C<$@>.   If the file is
successfully compiled, C<do> returns the value of the last expression
evaluated.

Note that inclusion of library modules is better done with the
C<use> and C<require> operators, which also do automatic error checking
and raise an exception if there's a problem.

You might like to use C<do> to read in a program configuration
file.  Manual error checking can be done this way:

    # read in config files: system first, then user
    for $file ("/share/prog/defaults.rc",
               "$ENV{HOME}/.someprogrc")
   {
        unless ($return = do $file) {
            warn "couldn't parse $file: $@" if $@;
            warn "couldn't do $file: $!"    unless defined $return;
            warn "couldn't run $file"       unless $return;
        }
    }

=item dump LABEL

=item dump

This function causes an immediate core dump.  See also the B<-u>
command-line switch in L<perlrun>, which does the same thing.
Primarily this is so that you can use the B<undump> program (not
supplied) to turn your core dump into an executable binary after
having initialized all your variables at the beginning of the
program.  When the new binary is executed it will begin by executing
a C<goto LABEL> (with all the restrictions that C<goto> suffers).
Think of it as a goto with an intervening core dump and reincarnation.
If C<LABEL> is omitted, restarts the program from the top.

B<WARNING>: Any files opened at the time of the dump will I<not>
be open any more when the program is reincarnated, with possible
resulting confusion on the part of Perl.

This function is now largely obsolete, partly because it's very
hard to convert a core file into an executable, and because the
real compiler backends for generating portable bytecode and compilable
C code have superseded it.  That's why you should now invoke it as
C<CORE::dump()>, if you don't want to be warned against a possible
typo.

If you're looking to use L<dump> to speed up your program, consider
generating bytecode or native C code as described in L<perlcc>.  If
you're just trying to accelerate a CGI script, consider using the
C<mod_perl> extension to B<Apache>, or the CPAN module, CGI::Fast.
You might also consider autoloading or selfloading, which at least
make your program I<appear> to run faster.

=item each HASH

When called in list context, returns a 2-element list consisting of the
key and value for the next element of a hash, so that you can iterate over
it.  When called in scalar context, returns only the key for the next
element in the hash.

Entries are returned in an apparently random order.  The actual random
order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it is
guaranteed to be in the same order as either the C<keys> or C<values>
function would produce on the same (unmodified) hash.  Since Perl
5.8.1 the ordering is different even between different runs of Perl
for security reasons (see L<perlsec/"Algorithmic Complexity Attacks">).

When the hash is entirely read, a null array is returned in list context
(which when assigned produces a false (C<0>) value), and C<undef> in
scalar context.  The next call to C<each> after that will start iterating
again.  There is a single iterator for each hash, shared by all C<each>,
C<keys>, and C<values> function calls in the program; it can be reset by
reading all the elements from the hash, or by evaluating C<keys HASH> or
C<values HASH>.  If you add or delete elements of a hash while you're
iterating over it, you may get entries skipped or duplicated, so
don't.  Exception: It is always safe to delete the item most recently
returned by C<each()>, which means that the following code will work:

        while (($key, $value) = each %hash) {
          print $key, "\n";
          delete $hash{$key};   # This is safe
        }

The following prints out your environment like the printenv(1) program,
only in a different order:

    while (($key,$value) = each %ENV) {
        print "$key=$value\n";
    }

See also C<keys>, C<values> and C<sort>.

=item eof FILEHANDLE

=item eof ()

=item eof

Returns 1 if the next read on FILEHANDLE will return end of file, or if
FILEHANDLE is not open.  FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value
gives the real filehandle.  (Note that this function actually
reads a character and then C<ungetc>s it, so isn't very useful in an
interactive context.)  Do not read from a terminal file (or call
C<eof(FILEHANDLE)> on it) after end-of-file is reached.  File types such
as terminals may lose the end-of-file condition if you do.

An C<eof> without an argument uses the last file read.  Using C<eof()>
with empty parentheses is very different.  It refers to the pseudo file
formed from the files listed on the command line and accessed via the
C<< <> >> operator.  Since C<< <> >> isn't explicitly opened,
as a normal filehandle is, an C<eof()> before C<< <> >> has been
used will cause C<@ARGV> to be examined to determine if input is
available.   Similarly, an C<eof()> after C<< <> >> has returned
end-of-file will assume you are processing another C<@ARGV> list,
and if you haven't set C<@ARGV>, will read input from C<STDIN>;
see L<perlop/"I/O Operators">.

In a C<< while (<>) >> loop, C<eof> or C<eof(ARGV)> can be used to
detect the end of each file, C<eof()> will only detect the end of the
last file.  Examples:

    # reset line numbering on each input file
    while (<>) {
        next if /^\s*#/;        # skip comments
        print "$.\t$_";
    } continue {
        close ARGV  if eof;     # Not eof()!
    }

    # insert dashes just before last line of last file
    while (<>) {
        if (eof()) {            # check for end of last file
            print "--------------\n";
        }
        print;
        last if eof();          # needed if we're reading from a terminal
    }

Practical hint: you almost never need to use C<eof> in Perl, because the
input operators typically return C<undef> when they run out of data, or if
there was an error.

=item eval EXPR

=item eval BLOCK

In the first form, the return value of EXPR is parsed and executed as if it
were a little Perl program.  The value of the expression (which is itself
determined within scalar context) is first parsed, and if there weren't any
errors, executed in the lexical context of the current Perl program, so
that any variable settings or subroutine and format definitions remain
afterwards.  Note that the value is parsed every time the eval executes.
If EXPR is omitted, evaluates C<$_>.  This form is typically used to
delay parsing and subsequent execution of the text of EXPR until run time.

In the second form, the code within the BLOCK is parsed only once--at the
same time the code surrounding the eval itself was parsed--and executed
within the context of the current Perl program.  This form is typically
used to trap exceptions more efficiently than the first (see below), while
also providing the benefit of checking the code within BLOCK at compile
time.

The final semicolon, if any, may be omitted from the value of EXPR or within
the BLOCK.

In both forms, the value returned is the value of the last expression
evaluated inside the mini-program; a return statement may be also used, just
as with subroutines.  The expression providing the return value is evaluated
in void, scalar, or list context, depending on the context of the eval itself.
See L</wantarray> for more on how the evaluation context can be determined.

If there is a syntax error or runtime error, or a C<die> statement is
executed, an undefined value is returned by C<eval>, and C<$@> is set to the
error message.  If there was no error, C<$@> is guaranteed to be a null
string.  Beware that using C<eval> neither silences perl from printing
warnings to STDERR, nor does it stuff the text of warning messages into C<$@>.
To do either of those, you have to use the C<$SIG{__WARN__}> facility, or
turn off warnings inside the BLOCK or EXPR using S<C<no warnings 'all'>>.
See L</warn>, L<perlvar>, L<warnings> and L<perllexwarn>.

Note that, because C<eval> traps otherwise-fatal errors, it is useful for
determining whether a particular feature (such as C<socket> or C<symlink>)
is implemented.  It is also Perl's exception trapping mechanism, where
the die operator is used to raise exceptions.

If the code to be executed doesn't vary, you may use the eval-BLOCK
form to trap run-time errors without incurring the penalty of
recompiling each time.  The error, if any, is still returned in C<$@>.
Examples:

    # make divide-by-zero nonfatal
    eval { $answer = $a / $b; }; warn $@ if $@;

    # same thing, but less efficient
    eval '$answer = $a / $b'; warn $@ if $@;

    # a compile-time error
    eval { $answer = };                 # WRONG

    # a run-time error
    eval '$answer =';   # sets $@

Due to the current arguably broken state of C<__DIE__> hooks, when using
the C<eval{}> form as an exception trap in libraries, you may wish not
to trigger any C<__DIE__> hooks that user code may have installed.
You can use the C<local $SIG{__DIE__}> construct for this purpose,
as shown in this example:

    # a very private exception trap for divide-by-zero
    eval { local $SIG{'__DIE__'}; $answer = $a / $b; };
    warn $@ if $@;

This is especially significant, given that C<__DIE__> hooks can call
C<die> again, which has the effect of changing their error messages:

    # __DIE__ hooks may modify error messages
    {
       local $SIG{'__DIE__'} =
              sub { (my $x = $_[0]) =~ s/foo/bar/g; die $x };
       eval { die "foo lives here" };
       print $@ if $@;                # prints "bar lives here"
    }

Because this promotes action at a distance, this counterintuitive behavior
may be fixed in a future release.

With an C<eval>, you should be especially careful to remember what's
being looked at when:

    eval $x;            # CASE 1
    eval "$x";          # CASE 2

    eval '$x';          # CASE 3
    eval { $x };        # CASE 4

    eval "\$$x++";      # CASE 5
    $$x++;              # CASE 6

Cases 1 and 2 above behave identically: they run the code contained in
the variable $x.  (Although case 2 has misleading double quotes making
the reader wonder what else might be happening (nothing is).)  Cases 3
and 4 likewise behave in the same way: they run the code C<'$x'>, which
does nothing but return the value of $x.  (Case 4 is preferred for
purely visual reasons, but it also has the advantage of compiling at
compile-time instead of at run-time.)  Case 5 is a place where
normally you I<would> like to use double quotes, except that in this
particular situation, you can just use symbolic references instead, as
in case 6.

C<eval BLOCK> does I<not> count as a loop, so the loop control statements
C<next>, C<last>, or C<redo> cannot be used to leave or restart the block.

Note that as a very special case, an C<eval ''> executed within the C<DB>
package doesn't see the usual surrounding lexical scope, but rather the
scope of the first non-DB piece of code that called it. You don't normally
need to worry about this unless you are writing a Perl debugger.

=item exec LIST

=item exec PROGRAM LIST

The C<exec> function executes a system command I<and never returns>--
use C<system> instead of C<exec> if you want it to return.  It fails and
returns false only if the command does not exist I<and> it is executed
directly instead of via your system's command shell (see below).

Since it's a common mistake to use C<exec> instead of C<system>, Perl
warns you if there is a following statement which isn't C<die>, C<warn>,
or C<exit> (if C<-w> is set  -  but you always do that).   If you
I<really> want to follow an C<exec> with some other statement, you
can use one of these styles to avoid the warning:

    exec ('foo')   or print STDERR "couldn't exec foo: $!";
    { exec ('foo') }; print STDERR "couldn't exec foo: $!";

If there is more than one argument in LIST, or if LIST is an array
with more than one value, calls execvp(3) with the arguments in LIST.
If there is only one scalar argument or an array with one element in it,
the argument is checked for shell metacharacters, and if there are any,
the entire argument is passed to the system's command shell for parsing
(this is C</bin/sh -c> on Unix platforms, but varies on other platforms).
If there are no shell metacharacters in the argument, it is split into
words and passed directly to C<execvp>, which is more efficient.
Examples:

    exec '/bin/echo', 'Your arguments are: ', @ARGV;
    exec "sort $outfile | uniq";

If you don't really want to execute the first argument, but want to lie
to the program you are executing about its own name, you can specify
the program you actually want to run as an "indirect object" (without a
comma) in front of the LIST.  (This always forces interpretation of the
LIST as a multivalued list, even if there is only a single scalar in
the list.)  Example:

    $shell = '/bin/csh';
    exec $shell '-sh';          # pretend it's a login shell

or, more directly,

    exec {'/bin/csh'} '-sh';    # pretend it's a login shell

When the arguments get executed via the system shell, results will
be subject to its quirks and capabilities.  See L<perlop/"`STRING`">
for details.

Using an indirect object with C<exec> or C<system> is also more
secure.  This usage (which also works fine with system()) forces
interpretation of the arguments as a multivalued list, even if the
list had just one argument.  That way you're safe from the shell
expanding wildcards or splitting up words with whitespace in them.

    @args = ( "echo surprise" );

    exec @args;               # subject to shell escapes
                                # if @args == 1
    exec { $args[0] } @args;  # safe even with one-arg list

The first version, the one without the indirect object, ran the I<echo>
program, passing it C<"surprise"> an argument.  The second version
didn't--it tried to run a program literally called I<"echo surprise">,
didn't find it, and set C<$?> to a non-zero value indicating failure.

Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for
output before the exec, but this may not be supported on some platforms
(see L<perlport>).  To be safe, you may need to set C<$|> ($AUTOFLUSH
in English) or call the C<autoflush()> method of C<IO::Handle> on any
open handles in order to avoid lost output.

Note that C<exec> will not call your C<END> blocks, nor will it call
any C<DESTROY> methods in your objects.

=item exists EXPR

Given an expression that specifies a hash element or array element,
returns true if the specified element in the hash or array has ever
been initialized, even if the corresponding value is undefined.  The
element is not autovivified if it doesn't exist.

    print "Exists\n"    if exists $hash{$key};
    print "Defined\n"   if defined $hash{$key};
    print "True\n"      if $hash{$key};

    print "Exists\n"    if exists $array[$index];
    print "Defined\n"   if defined $array[$index];
    print "True\n"      if $array[$index];

A hash or array element can be true only if it's defined, and defined if
it exists, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold true.

Given an expression that specifies the name of a subroutine,
returns true if the specified subroutine has ever been declared, even
if it is undefined.  Mentioning a subroutine name for exists or defined
does not count as declaring it.  Note that a subroutine which does not
exist may still be callable: its package may have an C<AUTOLOAD>
method that makes it spring into existence the first time that it is
called -- see L<perlsub>.

    print "Exists\n"    if exists &subroutine;
    print "Defined\n"   if defined &subroutine;

Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final
operation is a hash or array key lookup or subroutine name:

    if (exists $ref->{A}->{B}->{$key})  { }
    if (exists $hash{A}{B}{$key})       { }

    if (exists $ref->{A}->{B}->[$ix])   { }
    if (exists $hash{A}{B}[$ix])        { }

    if (exists &{$ref->{A}{B}{$key}})   { }

Although the deepest nested array or hash will not spring into existence
just because its existence was tested, any intervening ones will.
Thus C<< $ref->{"A"} >> and C<< $ref->{"A"}->{"B"} >> will spring
into existence due to the existence test for the $key element above.
This happens anywhere the arrow operator is used, including even:

    undef $ref;
    if (exists $ref->{"Some key"})      { }
    print $ref;             # prints HASH(0x80d3d5c)

This surprising autovivification in what does not at first--or even
second--glance appear to be an lvalue context may be fixed in a future
release.

Use of a subroutine call, rather than a subroutine name, as an argument
to exists() is an error.

    exists &sub;        # OK
    exists &sub();      # Error

=item exit EXPR

Evaluates EXPR and exits immediately with that value.    Example:

    $ans = <STDIN>;
    exit 0 if $ans =~ /^[Xx]/;

See also C<die>.  If EXPR is omitted, exits with C<0> status.  The only
universally recognized values for EXPR are C<0> for success and C<1>
for error; other values are subject to interpretation depending on the
environment in which the Perl program is running.  For example, exiting
69 (EX_UNAVAILABLE) from a I<sendmail> incoming-mail filter will cause
the mailer to return the item undelivered, but that's not true everywhere.

Don't use C<exit> to abort a subroutine if there's any chance that
someone might want to trap whatever error happened.  Use C<die> instead,
which can be trapped by an C<eval>.

The exit() function does not always exit immediately.  It calls any
defined C<END> routines first, but these C<END> routines may not
themselves abort the exit.  Likewise any object destructors that need to
be called are called before the real exit.  If this is a problem, you
can call C<POSIX:_exit($status)> to avoid END and destructor processing.
See L<perlmod> for details.

=item exp EXPR

=item exp

Returns I<e> (the natural logarithm base) to the power of EXPR.
If EXPR is omitted, gives C<exp($_)>.

=item fcntl FILEHANDLE,FUNCTION,SCALAR

Implements the fcntl(2) function.  You'll probably have to say

    use Fcntl;

first to get the correct constant definitions.  Argument processing and
value return works just like C<ioctl> below.
For example:

    use Fcntl;
    fcntl($filehandle, F_GETFL, $packed_return_buffer)
        or die "can't fcntl F_GETFL: $!";

You don't have to check for C<defined> on the return from C<fcntl>.
Like C<ioctl>, it maps a C<0> return from the system call into
C<"0 but true"> in Perl.  This string is true in boolean context and C<0>
in numeric context.  It is also exempt from the normal B<-w> warnings
on improper numeric conversions.

Note that C<fcntl> will produce a fatal error if used on a machine that
doesn't implement fcntl(2).  See the Fcntl module or your fcntl(2)
manpage to learn what functions are available on your system.

Here's an example of setting a filehandle named C<REMOTE> to be
non-blocking at the system level.  You'll have to negotiate C<$|>
on your own, though.

    use Fcntl qw(F_GETFL F_SETFL O_NONBLOCK);

    $flags = fcntl(REMOTE, F_GETFL, 0)
                or die "Can't get flags for the socket: $!\n";

    $flags = fcntl(REMOTE, F_SETFL, $flags | O_NONBLOCK)
                or die "Can't set flags for the socket: $!\n";

=item fileno FILEHANDLE

Returns the file descriptor for a filehandle, or undefined if the
filehandle is not open.  This is mainly useful for constructing
bitmaps for C<select> and low-level POSIX tty-handling operations.
If FILEHANDLE is an expression, the value is taken as an indirect
filehandle, generally its name.

You can use this to find out whether two handles refer to the
same underlying descriptor:

    if (fileno(THIS) == fileno(THAT)) {
        print "THIS and THAT are dups\n";
    }

(Filehandles connected to memory objects via new features of C<open> may
return undefined even though they are open.)


=item flock FILEHANDLE,OPERATION

Calls flock(2), or an emulation of it, on FILEHANDLE.  Returns true
for success, false on failure.  Produces a fatal error if used on a
machine that doesn't implement flock(2), fcntl(2) locking, or lockf(3).
C<flock> is Perl's portable file locking interface, although it locks
only entire files, not records.

Two potentially non-obvious but traditional C<flock> semantics are
that it waits indefinitely until the lock is granted, and that its locks
B<merely advisory>.  Such discretionary locks are more flexible, but offer
fewer guarantees.  This means that files locked with C<flock> may be
modified by programs that do not also use C<flock>.  See L<perlport>,
your port's specific documentation, or your system-specific local manpages
for details.  It's best to assume traditional behavior if you're writing
portable programs.  (But if you're not, you should as always feel perfectly
free to write for your own system's idiosyncrasies (sometimes called
"features").  Slavish adherence to portability concerns shouldn't get
in the way of your getting your job done.)

OPERATION is one of LOCK_SH, LOCK_EX, or LOCK_UN, possibly combined with
LOCK_NB.  These constants are traditionally valued 1, 2, 8 and 4, but
you can use the symbolic names if you import them from the Fcntl module,
either individually, or as a group using the ':flock' tag.  LOCK_SH
requests a shared lock, LOCK_EX requests an exclusive lock, and LOCK_UN
releases a previously requested lock.  If LOCK_NB is bitwise-or'ed with
LOCK_SH or LOCK_EX then C<flock> will return immediately rather than blocking
waiting for the lock (check the return status to see if you got it).

To avoid the possibility of miscoordination, Perl now flushes FILEHANDLE
before locking or unlocking it.

Note that the emulation built with lockf(3) doesn't provide shared
locks, and it requires that FILEHANDLE be open with write intent.  These
are the semantics that lockf(3) implements.  Most if not all systems
implement lockf(3) in terms of fcntl(2) locking, though, so the
differing semantics shouldn't bite too many people.

Note that the fcntl(2) emulation of flock(3) requires that FILEHANDLE
be open with read intent to use LOCK_SH and requires that it be open
with write intent to use LOCK_EX.

Note also that some versions of C<flock> cannot lock things over the
network; you would need to use the more system-specific C<fcntl> for
that.  If you like you can force Perl to ignore your system's flock(2)
function, and so provide its own fcntl(2)-based emulation, by passing
the switch C<-Ud_flock> to the F<Configure> program when you configure
perl.

Here's a mailbox appender for BSD systems.

    use Fcntl ':flock'; # import LOCK_* constants

    sub lock {
        flock(MBOX,LOCK_EX);
        # and, in case someone appended
        # while we were waiting...
        seek(MBOX, 0, 2);
    }

    sub unlock {
        flock(MBOX,LOCK_UN);
    }

    open(MBOX, ">>/usr/spool/mail/$ENV{'USER'}")
            or die "Can't open mailbox: $!";

    lock();
    print MBOX $msg,"\n\n";
    unlock();

On systems that support a real flock(), locks are inherited across fork()
calls, whereas those that must resort to the more capricious fcntl()
function lose the locks, making it harder to write servers.

See also L<DB_File> for other flock() examples.

=item fork

Does a fork(2) system call to create a new process running the
same program at the same point.  It returns the child pid to the
parent process, C<0> to the child process, or C<undef> if the fork is
unsuccessful.  File descriptors (and sometimes locks on those descriptors)
are shared, while everything else is copied.  On most systems supporting
fork(), great care has gone into making it extremely efficient (for
example, using copy-on-write technology on data pages), making it the
dominant paradigm for multitasking over the last few decades.

Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for
output before forking the child process, but this may not be supported
on some platforms (see L<perlport>).  To be safe, you may need to set
C<$|> ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the C<autoflush()> method of
C<IO::Handle> on any open handles in order to avoid duplicate output.

If you C<fork> without ever waiting on your children, you will
accumulate zombies.  On some systems, you can avoid this by setting
C<$SIG{CHLD}> to C<"IGNORE">.  See also L<perlipc> for more examples of
forking and reaping moribund children.

Note that if your forked child inherits system file descriptors like
STDIN and STDOUT that are actually connected by a pipe or socket, even
if you exit, then the remote server (such as, say, a CGI script or a
backgrounded job launched from a remote shell) won't think you're done.
You should reopen those to F</dev/null> if it's any issue.

=item format

Declare a picture format for use by the C<write> function.  For
example:

    format Something =
        Test: @<<<<<<<< @||||| @>>>>>
              $str,     $%,    '$' . int($num)
    .

    $str = "widget";
    $num = $cost/$quantity;
    $~ = 'Something';
    write;

See L<perlform> for many details and examples.

=item formline PICTURE,LIST

This is an internal function used by C<format>s, though you may call it,
too.  It formats (see L<perlform>) a list of values according to the
contents of PICTURE, placing the output into the format output
accumulator, C<$^A> (or C<$ACCUMULATOR> in English).
Eventually, when a C<write> is done, the contents of
C<$^A> are written to some filehandle, but you could also read C<$^A>
yourself and then set C<$^A> back to C<"">.  Note that a format typically
does one C<formline> per line of form, but the C<formline> function itself
doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the PICTURE.  This means
that the C<~> and C<~~> tokens will treat the entire PICTURE as a single line.
You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single
record format, just like the format compiler.

Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, because an C<@>
character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.
C<formline> always returns true.  See L<perlform> for other examples.

=item getc FILEHANDLE

=item getc

Returns the next character from the input file attached to FILEHANDLE,
or the undefined value at end of file, or if there was an error (in
the latter case C<$!> is set).  If FILEHANDLE is omitted, reads from
STDIN.  This is not particularly efficient.  However, it cannot be
used by itself to fetch single characters without waiting for the user
to hit enter.  For that, try something more like:

    if ($BSD_STYLE) {
        system "stty cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1";
    }
    else {
        system "stty", '-icanon', 'eol', "\001";
    }

    $key = getc(STDIN);

    if ($BSD_STYLE) {
        system "stty -cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1";
    }
    else {
        system "stty", 'icanon', 'eol', '^@'; # ASCII null
    }
    print "\n";

Determination of whether $BSD_STYLE should be set
is left as an exercise to the reader.

The C<POSIX::getattr> function can do this more portably on
systems purporting POSIX compliance.  See also the C<Term::ReadKey>
module from your nearest CPAN site; details on CPAN can be found on
L<perlmodlib/CPAN>.

=item getlogin

Implements the C library function of the same name, which on most
systems returns the current login from F</etc/utmp>, if any.  If null,
use C<getpwuid>.

    $login = getlogin || getpwuid($<) || "Kilroy";

Do not consider C<getlogin> for authentication: it is not as
secure as C<getpwuid>.

=item getpeername SOCKET

Returns the packed sockaddr address of other end of the SOCKET connection.

    use Socket;
    $hersockaddr    = getpeername(SOCK);
    ($port, $iaddr) = sockaddr_in($hersockaddr);
    $herhostname    = gethostbyaddr($iaddr, AF_INET);
    $herstraddr     = inet_ntoa($iaddr);

=item getpgrp PID

Returns the current process group for the specified PID.  Use
a PID of C<0> to get the current process group for the
current process.  Will raise an exception if used on a machine that
doesn't implement getpgrp(2).  If PID is omitted, returns process
group of current process.  Note that the POSIX version of C<getpgrp>
does not accept a PID argument, so only C<PID==0> is truly portable.

=item getppid

Returns the process id of the parent process.

Note for Linux users: on Linux, the C functions C<getpid()> and
C<getppid()> return different values from different threads. In order to
be portable, this behavior is not reflected by the perl-level function
C<getppid()>, that returns a consistent value across threads. If you want
to call the underlying C<getppid()>, you may use the CPAN module
C<Linux::Pid>.

=item getpriority WHICH,WHO

Returns the current priority for a process, a process group, or a user.
(See L<getpriority(2)>.)  Will raise a fatal exception if used on a
machine that doesn't implement getpriority(2).

=item getpwnam NAME

=item getgrnam NAME

=item gethostbyname NAME

=item getnetbyname NAME

=item getprotobyname NAME

=item getpwuid UID

=item getgrgid GID

=item getservbyname NAME,PROTO

=item gethostbyaddr ADDR,ADDRTYPE

=item getnetbyaddr ADDR,ADDRTYPE

=item getprotobynumber NUMBER

=item getservbyport PORT,PROTO

=item getpwent

=item getgrent

=item gethostent

=item getnetent

=item getprotoent

=item getservent

=item setpwent

=item setgrent

=item sethostent STAYOPEN

=item setnetent STAYOPEN

=item setprotoent STAYOPEN

=item setservent STAYOPEN

=item endpwent

=item endgrent

=item endhostent

=item endnetent

=item endprotoent

=item endservent

These routines perform the same functions as their counterparts in the
system library.  In list context, the return values from the
various get routines are as follows:

    ($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid,
       $quota,$comment,$gcos,$dir,$shell,$expire) = getpw*
    ($name,$passwd,$gid,$members) = getgr*
    ($name,$aliases,$addrtype,$length,@addrs) = gethost*
    ($name,$aliases,$addrtype,$net) = getnet*
    ($name,$aliases,$proto) = getproto*
    ($name,$aliases,$port,$proto) = getserv*

(If the entry doesn't exist you get a null list.)

The exact meaning of the $gcos field varies but it usually contains
the real name of the user (as opposed to the login name) and other
information pertaining to the user.  Beware, however, that in many
system users are able to change this information and therefore it
cannot be trusted and therefore the $gcos is tainted (see
L<perlsec>).  The $passwd and $shell, user's encrypted password and
login shell, are also tainted, because of the same reason.

In scalar context, you get the name, unless the function was a
lookup by name, in which case you get the other thing, whatever it is.
(If the entry doesn't exist you get the undefined value.)  For example:

    $uid   = getpwnam($name);
    $name  = getpwuid($num);
    $name  = getpwent();
    $gid   = getgrnam($name);
    $name  = getgrgid($num);
    $name  = getgrent();
    #etc.

In I<getpw*()> the fields $quota, $comment, and $expire are special
cases in the sense that in many systems they are unsupported.  If the
$quota is unsupported, it is an empty scalar.  If it is supported, it
usually encodes the disk quota.  If the $comment field is unsupported,
it is an empty scalar.  If it is supported it usually encodes some
administrative comment about the user.  In some systems the $quota
field may be $change or $age, fields that have to do with password
aging.  In some systems the $comment field may be $class.  The $expire
field, if present, encodes the expiration period of the account or the
password.  For the availability and the exact meaning of these fields
in your system, please consult your getpwnam(3) documentation and your
F<pwd.h> file.  You can also find out from within Perl what your
$quota and $comment fields mean and whether you have the $expire field
by using the C<Config> module and the values C<d_pwquota>, C<d_pwage>,
C<d_pwchange>, C<d_pwcomment>, and C<d_pwexpire>.  Shadow password
files are only supported if your vendor has implemented them in the
intuitive fashion that calling the regular C library routines gets the
shadow versions if you're running under privilege or if there exists
the shadow(3) functions as found in System V ( this includes Solaris
and Linux.)  Those systems which implement a proprietary shadow password
facility are unlikely to be supported.

The $members value returned by I<getgr*()> is a space separated list of
the login names of the members of the group.

For the I<gethost*()> functions, if the C<h_errno> variable is supported in
C, it will be returned to you via C<$?> if the function call fails.  The
C<@addrs> value returned by a successful call is a list of the raw
addresses returned by the corresponding system library call.  In the
Internet domain, each address is four bytes long and you can unpack it
by saying something like:

    ($a,$b,$c,$d) = unpack('W4',$addr[0]);

The Socket library makes this slightly easier:

    use Socket;
    $iaddr = inet_aton("127.1"); # or whatever address
    $name  = gethostbyaddr($iaddr, AF_INET);

    # or going the other way
    $straddr = inet_ntoa($iaddr);

If you get tired of remembering which element of the return list
contains which return value, by-name interfaces are provided
in standard modules: C<File::stat>, C<Net::hostent>, C<Net::netent>,
C<Net::protoent>, C<Net::servent>, C<Time::gmtime>, C<Time::localtime>,
and C<User::grent>.  These override the normal built-ins, supplying
versions that return objects with the appropriate names
for each field.  For example:

   use File::stat;
   use User::pwent;
   $is_his = (stat($filename)->uid == pwent($whoever)->uid);

Even though it looks like they're the same method calls (uid),
they aren't, because a C<File::stat> object is different from
a C<User::pwent> object.

=item getsockname SOCKET

Returns the packed sockaddr address of this end of the SOCKET connection,
in case you don't know the address because you have several different
IPs that the connection might have come in on.

    use Socket;
    $mysockaddr = getsockname(SOCK);
    ($port, $myaddr) = sockaddr_in($mysockaddr);
    printf "Connect to %s [%s]\n",
       scalar gethostbyaddr($myaddr, AF_INET),
       inet_ntoa($myaddr);

=item getsockopt SOCKET,LEVEL,OPTNAME

Queries the option named OPTNAME associated with SOCKET at a given LEVEL.
Options may exist at multiple protocol levels depending on the socket
type, but at least the uppermost socket level SOL_SOCKET (defined in the
C<Socket> module) will exist. To query options at another level the
protocol number of the appropriate protocol controlling the option
should be supplied. For example, to indicate that an option is to be
interpreted by the TCP protocol, LEVEL should be set to the protocol
number of TCP, which you can get using getprotobyname.

The call returns a packed string representing the requested socket option,
or C<undef> if there is an error (the error reason will be in $!). What
exactly is in the packed string depends in the LEVEL and OPTNAME, consult
your system documentation for details. A very common case however is that
the option is an integer, in which case the result will be an packed
integer which you can decode using unpack with the C<i> (or C<I>) format.

An example testing if Nagle's algorithm is turned on on a socket:

    use Socket qw(:all);

    defined(my $tcp = getprotobyname("tcp"))
        or die "Could not determine the protocol number for tcp";
    # my $tcp = IPPROTO_TCP; # Alternative
    my $packed = getsockopt($socket, $tcp, TCP_NODELAY)
        or die "Could not query TCP_NODELAY socket option: $!";
    my $nodelay = unpack("I", $packed);
    print "Nagle's algorithm is turned ", $nodelay ? "off\n" : "on\n";


=item glob EXPR

=item glob

In list context, returns a (possibly empty) list of filename expansions on
the value of EXPR such as the standard Unix shell F</bin/csh> would do. In
scalar context, glob iterates through such filename expansions, returning
undef when the list is exhausted. This is the internal function
implementing the C<< <*.c> >> operator, but you can use it directly. If
EXPR is omitted, C<$_> is used.  The C<< <*.c> >> operator is discussed in
more detail in L<perlop/"I/O Operators">.

Beginning with v5.6.0, this operator is implemented using the standard
C<File::Glob> extension.  See L<File::Glob> for details.

=item gmtime EXPR

Converts a time as returned by the time function to an 8-element list
with the time localized for the standard Greenwich time zone.
Typically used as follows:

    #  0    1    2     3     4    5     6     7
    ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday) =
                                            gmtime(time);

All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct
tm'.  $sec, $min, and $hour are the seconds, minutes, and hours of the
specified time.  $mday is the day of the month, and $mon is the month
itself, in the range C<0..11> with 0 indicating January and 11
indicating December.  $year is the number of years since 1900.  That
is, $year is C<123> in year 2023.  $wday is the day of the week, with
0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicating Wednesday.  $yday is the day of
the year, in the range C<0..364> (or C<0..365> in leap years.)

Note that the $year element is I<not> simply the last two digits of
the year.  If you assume it is, then you create non-Y2K-compliant
programs--and you wouldn't want to do that, would you?

The proper way to get a complete 4-digit year is simply:

        $year += 1900;

And to get the last two digits of the year (e.g., '01' in 2001) do:

        $year = sprintf("%02d", $year % 100);

If EXPR is omitted, C<gmtime()> uses the current time (C<gmtime(time)>).

In scalar context, C<gmtime()> returns the ctime(3) value:

    $now_string = gmtime;  # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994"

If you need local time instead of GMT use the L</localtime> builtin. 
See also the C<timegm> function provided by the C<Time::Local> module,
and the strftime(3) and mktime(3) functions available via the L<POSIX> module.

This scalar value is B<not> locale dependent (see L<perllocale>), but is
instead a Perl builtin.  To get somewhat similar but locale dependent date
strings, see the example in L</localtime>.

=item goto LABEL

=item goto EXPR

=item goto &NAME

The C<goto-LABEL> form finds the statement labeled with LABEL and resumes
execution there.  It may not be used to go into any construct that
requires initialization, such as a subroutine or a C<foreach> loop.  It
also can't be used to go into a construct that is optimized away,
or to get out of a block or subroutine given to C<sort>.
It can be used to go almost anywhere else within the dynamic scope,
including out of subroutines, but it's usually better to use some other
construct such as C<last> or C<die>.  The author of Perl has never felt the
need to use this form of C<goto> (in Perl, that is--C is another matter).
(The difference being that C does not offer named loops combined with
loop control.  Perl does, and this replaces most structured uses of C<goto>
in other languages.)

The C<goto-EXPR> form expects a label name, whose scope will be resolved
dynamically.  This allows for computed C<goto>s per FORTRAN, but isn't
necessarily recommended if you're optimizing for maintainability:

    goto ("FOO", "BAR", "GLARCH")[$i];

The C<goto-&NAME> form is quite different from the other forms of
C<goto>.  In fact, it isn't a goto in the normal sense at all, and
doesn't have the stigma associated with other gotos.  Instead, it
exits the current subroutine (losing any changes set by local()) and
immediately calls in its place the named subroutine using the current
value of @_.  This is used by C<AUTOLOAD> subroutines that wish to
load another subroutine and then pretend that the other subroutine had
been called in the first place (except that any modifications to C<@_>
in the current subroutine are propagated to the other subroutine.)
After the C<goto>, not even C<caller> will be able to tell that this
routine was called first.

NAME needn't be the name of a subroutine; it can be a scalar variable
containing a code reference, or a block which evaluates to a code
reference.

=item grep BLOCK LIST

=item grep EXPR,LIST

This is similar in spirit to, but not the same as, grep(1) and its
relatives.  In particular, it is not limited to using regular expressions.

Evaluates the BLOCK or EXPR for each element of LIST (locally setting
C<$_> to each element) and returns the list value consisting of those
elements for which the expression evaluated to true.  In scalar
context, returns the number of times the expression was true.

    @foo = grep(!/^#/, @bar);    # weed out comments

or equivalently,

    @foo = grep {!/^#/} @bar;    # weed out comments

Note that C<$_> is an alias to the list value, so it can be used to
modify the elements of the LIST.  While this is useful and supported,
it can cause bizarre results if the elements of LIST are not variables.
Similarly, grep returns aliases into the original list, much as a for
loop's index variable aliases the list elements.  That is, modifying an
element of a list returned by grep (for example, in a C<foreach>, C<map>
or another C<grep>) actually modifies the element in the original list.
This is usually something to be avoided when writing clear code.

If C<$_> is lexical in the scope where the C<grep> appears (because it has
been declared with C<my $_>) then, in addition the be locally aliased to
the list elements, C<$_> keeps being lexical inside the block; i.e. it
can't be seen from the outside, avoiding any potential side-effects.

See also L</map> for a list composed of the results of the BLOCK or EXPR.

=item hex EXPR

=item hex

Interprets EXPR as a hex string and returns the corresponding value.
(To convert strings that might start with either C<0>, C<0x>, or C<0b>, see
L</oct>.)  If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.

    print hex '0xAf'; # prints '175'
    print hex 'aF';   # same

Hex strings may only represent integers.  Strings that would cause
integer overflow trigger a warning.  Leading whitespace is not stripped,
unlike oct(). To present something as hex, look into L</printf>,
L</sprintf>, or L</unpack>.

=item import

There is no builtin C<import> function.  It is just an ordinary
method (subroutine) defined (or inherited) by modules that wish to export
names to another module.  The C<use> function calls the C<import> method
for the package used.  See also L</use>, L<perlmod>, and L<Exporter>.

=item index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION

=item index STR,SUBSTR

The index function searches for one string within another, but without
the wildcard-like behavior of a full regular-expression pattern match.
It returns the position of the first occurrence of SUBSTR in STR at
or after POSITION.  If POSITION is omitted, starts searching from the
beginning of the string.  The return value is based at C<0> (or whatever
you've set the C<$[> variable to--but don't do that).  If the substring
is not found, returns one less than the base, ordinarily C<-1>.

=item int EXPR

=item int

Returns the integer portion of EXPR.  If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.
You should not use this function for rounding: one because it truncates
towards C<0>, and two because machine representations of floating point
numbers can sometimes produce counterintuitive results.  For example,
C<int(-6.725/0.025)> produces -268 rather than the correct -269; that's
because it's really more like -268.99999999999994315658 instead.  Usually,
the C<sprintf>, C<printf>, or the C<POSIX::floor> and C<POSIX::ceil>
functions will serve you better than will int().

=item ioctl FILEHANDLE,FUNCTION,SCALAR

Implements the ioctl(2) function.  You'll probably first have to say

    require "ioctl.ph"; # probably in /usr/local/lib/perl/ioctl.ph

to get the correct function definitions.  If F<ioctl.ph> doesn't
exist or doesn't have the correct definitions you'll have to roll your
own, based on your C header files such as F<< <sys/ioctl.h> >>.
(There is a Perl script called B<h2ph> that comes with the Perl kit that
may help you in this, but it's nontrivial.)  SCALAR will be read and/or
written depending on the FUNCTION--a pointer to the string value of SCALAR
will be passed as the third argument of the actual C<ioctl> call.  (If SCALAR
has no string value but does have a numeric value, that value will be
passed rather than a pointer to the string value.  To guarantee this to be
true, add a C<0> to the scalar before using it.)  The C<pack> and C<unpack>
functions may be needed to manipulate the values of structures used by
C<ioctl>.

The return value of C<ioctl> (and C<fcntl>) is as follows:

        if OS returns:          then Perl returns:
            -1                    undefined value
             0                  string "0 but true"
        anything else               that number

Thus Perl returns true on success and false on failure, yet you can
still easily determine the actual value returned by the operating
system:

    $retval = ioctl(...) || -1;
    printf "System returned %d\n", $retval;

The special string C<"0 but true"> is exempt from B<-w> complaints
about improper numeric conversions.

=item join EXPR,LIST

Joins the separate strings of LIST into a single string with fields
separated by the value of EXPR, and returns that new string.  Example:

    $rec = join(':', $login,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$home,$shell);

Beware that unlike C<split>, C<join> doesn't take a pattern as its
first argument.  Compare L</split>.

=item keys HASH

Returns a list consisting of all the keys of the named hash.
(In scalar context, returns the number of keys.)

The keys are returned in an apparently random order.  The actual
random order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it
is guaranteed to be the same order as either the C<values> or C<each>
function produces (given that the hash has not been modified).  Since
Perl 5.8.1 the ordering is different even between different runs of
Perl for security reasons (see L<perlsec/"Algorithmic Complexity
Attacks">).

As a side effect, calling keys() resets the HASH's internal iterator,
see L</each>. (In particular, calling keys() in void context resets
the iterator with no other overhead.)

Here is yet another way to print your environment:

    @keys = keys %ENV;
    @values = values %ENV;
    while (@keys) {
        print pop(@keys), '=', pop(@values), "\n";
    }

or how about sorted by key:

    foreach $key (sort(keys %ENV)) {
        print $key, '=', $ENV{$key}, "\n";
    }

The returned values are copies of the original keys in the hash, so
modifying them will not affect the original hash.  Compare L</values>.

To sort a hash by value, you'll need to use a C<sort> function.
Here's a descending numeric sort of a hash by its values:

    foreach $key (sort { $hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a} } keys %hash) {
        printf "%4d %s\n", $hash{$key}, $key;
    }

As an lvalue C<keys> allows you to increase the number of hash buckets
allocated for the given hash.  This can gain you a measure of efficiency if
you know the hash is going to get big.  (This is similar to pre-extending
an array by assigning a larger number to $#array.)  If you say

    keys %hash = 200;

then C<%hash> will have at least 200 buckets allocated for it--256 of them,
in fact, since it rounds up to the next power of two.  These
buckets will be retained even if you do C<%hash = ()>, use C<undef
%hash> if you want to free the storage while C<%hash> is still in scope.
You can't shrink the number of buckets allocated for the hash using
C<keys> in this way (but you needn't worry about doing this by accident,
as trying has no effect).

See also C<each>, C<values> and C<sort>.

=item kill SIGNAL, LIST

Sends a signal to a list of processes.  Returns the number of
processes successfully signaled (which is not necessarily the
same as the number actually killed).

    $cnt = kill 1, $child1, $child2;
    kill 9, @goners;

If SIGNAL is zero, no signal is sent to the process.  This is a
useful way to check that a child process is alive and hasn't changed
its UID.  See L<perlport> for notes on the portability of this
construct.

Unlike in the shell, if SIGNAL is negative, it kills
process groups instead of processes.  (On System V, a negative I<PROCESS>
number will also kill process groups, but that's not portable.)  That
means you usually want to use positive not negative signals.  You may also
use a signal name in quotes.

See L<perlipc/"Signals"> for more details.

=item last LABEL

=item last

The C<last> command is like the C<break> statement in C (as used in
loops); it immediately exits the loop in question.  If the LABEL is
omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop.  The
C<continue> block, if any, is not executed:

    LINE: while (<STDIN>) {
        last LINE if /^$/;      # exit when done with header
        #...
    }

C<last> cannot be used to exit a block which returns a value such as
C<eval {}>, C<sub {}> or C<do {}>, and should not be used to exit
a grep() or map() operation.

Note that a block by itself is semantically identical to a loop
that executes once.  Thus C<last> can be used to effect an early
exit out of such a block.

See also L</continue> for an illustration of how C<last>, C<next>, and
C<redo> work.

=item lc EXPR

=item lc

Returns a lowercased version of EXPR.  This is the internal function
implementing the C<\L> escape in double-quoted strings.  Respects
current LC_CTYPE locale if C<use locale> in force.  See L<perllocale>
and L<perlunicode> for more details about locale and Unicode support.

If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item lcfirst EXPR

=item lcfirst

Returns the value of EXPR with the first character lowercased.  This
is the internal function implementing the C<\l> escape in
double-quoted strings.  Respects current LC_CTYPE locale if C<use
locale> in force.  See L<perllocale> and L<perlunicode> for more
details about locale and Unicode support.

If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item length EXPR

=item length

Returns the length in I<characters> of the value of EXPR.  If EXPR is
omitted, returns length of C<$_>.  Note that this cannot be used on
an entire array or hash to find out how many elements these have.
For that, use C<scalar @array> and C<scalar keys %hash> respectively.

Note the I<characters>: if the EXPR is in Unicode, you will get the
number of characters, not the number of bytes.  To get the length
in bytes, use C<do { use bytes; length(EXPR) }>, see L<bytes>.

=item link OLDFILE,NEWFILE

Creates a new filename linked to the old filename.  Returns true for
success, false otherwise.

=item listen SOCKET,QUEUESIZE

Does the same thing that the listen system call does.  Returns true if
it succeeded, false otherwise.  See the example in
L<perlipc/"Sockets: Client/Server Communication">.

=item local EXPR

You really probably want to be using C<my> instead, because C<local> isn't
what most people think of as "local".  See
L<perlsub/"Private Variables via my()"> for details.

A local modifies the listed variables to be local to the enclosing
block, file, or eval.  If more than one value is listed, the list must
be placed in parentheses.  See L<perlsub/"Temporary Values via local()">
for details, including issues with tied arrays and hashes.

=item localtime EXPR

=item localtime

Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 9-element list
with the time analyzed for the local time zone.  Typically used as
follows:

    #  0    1    2     3     4    5     6     7     8
    ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) =
                                                localtime(time);

All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct
tm'.  C<$sec>, C<$min>, and C<$hour> are the seconds, minutes, and hours
of the specified time.

C<$mday> is the day of the month, and C<$mon> is the month itself, in
the range C<0..11> with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December.
This makes it easy to get a month name from a list:

    my @abbr = qw( Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec );
    print "$abbr[$mon] $mday";
    # $mon=9, $mday=18 gives "Oct 18"

C<$year> is the number of years since 1900, not just the last two digits
of the year.  That is, C<$year> is C<123> in year 2023.  The proper way
to get a complete 4-digit year is simply:

    $year += 1900;

To get the last two digits of the year (e.g., '01' in 2001) do:

    $year = sprintf("%02d", $year % 100);

C<$wday> is the day of the week, with 0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicating
Wednesday.  C<$yday> is the day of the year, in the range C<0..364>
(or C<0..365> in leap years.)

C<$isdst> is true if the specified time occurs during Daylight Saving
Time, false otherwise.

If EXPR is omitted, C<localtime()> uses the current time (C<localtime(time)>).

In scalar context, C<localtime()> returns the ctime(3) value:

    $now_string = localtime;  # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994"

This scalar value is B<not> locale dependent but is a Perl builtin. For GMT
instead of local time use the L</gmtime> builtin. See also the
C<Time::Local> module (to convert the second, minutes, hours, ... back to
the integer value returned by time()), and the L<POSIX> module's strftime(3)
and mktime(3) functions.

To get somewhat similar but locale dependent date strings, set up your
locale environment variables appropriately (please see L<perllocale>) and
try for example:

    use POSIX qw(strftime);
    $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", localtime;
    # or for GMT formatted appropriately for your locale:
    $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", gmtime;

Note that the C<%a> and C<%b>, the short forms of the day of the week
and the month of the year, may not necessarily be three characters wide.

=item lock THING

This function places an advisory lock on a shared variable, or referenced
object contained in I<THING> until the lock goes out of scope.

lock() is a "weak keyword" : this means that if you've defined a function
by this name (before any calls to it), that function will be called
instead. (However, if you've said C<use threads>, lock() is always a
keyword.) See L<threads>.

=item log EXPR

=item log

Returns the natural logarithm (base I<e>) of EXPR.  If EXPR is omitted,
returns log of C<$_>.  To get the log of another base, use basic algebra:
The base-N log of a number is equal to the natural log of that number
divided by the natural log of N.  For example:

    sub log10 {
        my $n = shift;
        return log($n)/log(10);
    }

See also L</exp> for the inverse operation.

=item lstat EXPR

=item lstat

Does the same thing as the C<stat> function (including setting the
special C<_> filehandle) but stats a symbolic link instead of the file
the symbolic link points to.  If symbolic links are unimplemented on
your system, a normal C<stat> is done.  For much more detailed
information, please see the documentation for C<stat>.

If EXPR is omitted, stats C<$_>.

=item m//

The match operator.  See L<perlop>.

=item map BLOCK LIST

=item map EXPR,LIST

Evaluates the BLOCK or EXPR for each element of LIST (locally setting
C<$_> to each element) and returns the list value composed of the
results of each such evaluation.  In scalar context, returns the
total number of elements so generated.  Evaluates BLOCK or EXPR in
list context, so each element of LIST may produce zero, one, or
more elements in the returned value.

    @chars = map(chr, @nums);

translates a list of numbers to the corresponding characters.  And

    %hash = map { getkey($_) => $_ } @array;

is just a funny way to write

    %hash = ();
    foreach $_ (@array) {
        $hash{getkey($_)} = $_;
    }

Note that C<$_> is an alias to the list value, so it can be used to
modify the elements of the LIST.  While this is useful and supported,
it can cause bizarre results if the elements of LIST are not variables.
Using a regular C<foreach> loop for this purpose would be clearer in
most cases.  See also L</grep> for an array composed of those items of
the original list for which the BLOCK or EXPR evaluates to true.

If C<$_> is lexical in the scope where the C<map> appears (because it has
been declared with C<my $_>) then, in addition the be locally aliased to
the list elements, C<$_> keeps being lexical inside the block; i.e. it
can't be seen from the outside, avoiding any potential side-effects.

C<{> starts both hash references and blocks, so C<map { ...> could be either
the start of map BLOCK LIST or map EXPR, LIST. Because perl doesn't look
ahead for the closing C<}> it has to take a guess at which its dealing with
based what it finds just after the C<{>. Usually it gets it right, but if it
doesn't it won't realize something is wrong until it gets to the C<}> and
encounters the missing (or unexpected) comma. The syntax error will be
reported close to the C<}> but you'll need to change something near the C<{>
such as using a unary C<+> to give perl some help:

    %hash = map {  "\L$_", 1  } @array  # perl guesses EXPR.  wrong
    %hash = map { +"\L$_", 1  } @array  # perl guesses BLOCK. right
    %hash = map { ("\L$_", 1) } @array  # this also works
    %hash = map {  lc($_), 1  } @array  # as does this.
    %hash = map +( lc($_), 1 ), @array  # this is EXPR and works!

    %hash = map  ( lc($_), 1 ), @array  # evaluates to (1, @array)

or to force an anon hash constructor use C<+{>

   @hashes = map +{ lc($_), 1 }, @array # EXPR, so needs , at end

and you get list of anonymous hashes each with only 1 entry.

=item mkdir FILENAME,MASK

=item mkdir FILENAME

=item mkdir

Creates the directory specified by FILENAME, with permissions
specified by MASK (as modified by C<umask>).  If it succeeds it
returns true, otherwise it returns false and sets C<$!> (errno).
If omitted, MASK defaults to 0777. If omitted, FILENAME defaults
to C<$_>.

In general, it is better to create directories with permissive MASK,
and let the user modify that with their C<umask>, than it is to supply
a restrictive MASK and give the user no way to be more permissive.
The exceptions to this rule are when the file or directory should be
kept private (mail files, for instance).  The perlfunc(1) entry on
C<umask> discusses the choice of MASK in more detail.

Note that according to the POSIX 1003.1-1996 the FILENAME may have any
number of trailing slashes.  Some operating and filesystems do not get
this right, so Perl automatically removes all trailing slashes to keep
everyone happy.

=item msgctl ID,CMD,ARG

Calls the System V IPC function msgctl(2).  You'll probably have to say

    use IPC::SysV;

first to get the correct constant definitions.  If CMD is C<IPC_STAT>,
then ARG must be a variable which will hold the returned C<msqid_ds>
structure.  Returns like C<ioctl>: the undefined value for error,
C<"0 but true"> for zero, or the actual return value otherwise.  See also
L<perlipc/"SysV IPC">, C<IPC::SysV>, and C<IPC::Semaphore> documentation.

=item msgget KEY,FLAGS

Calls the System V IPC function msgget(2).  Returns the message queue
id, or the undefined value if there is an error.  See also
L<perlipc/"SysV IPC"> and C<IPC::SysV> and C<IPC::Msg> documentation.

=item msgrcv ID,VAR,SIZE,TYPE,FLAGS

Calls the System V IPC function msgrcv to receive a message from
message queue ID into variable VAR with a maximum message size of
SIZE.  Note that when a message is received, the message type as a
native long integer will be the first thing in VAR, followed by the
actual message.  This packing may be opened with C<unpack("l! a*")>.
Taints the variable.  Returns true if successful, or false if there is
an error.  See also L<perlipc/"SysV IPC">, C<IPC::SysV>, and
C<IPC::SysV::Msg> documentation.

=item msgsnd ID,MSG,FLAGS

Calls the System V IPC function msgsnd to send the message MSG to the
message queue ID.  MSG must begin with the native long integer message
type, and be followed by the length of the actual message, and finally
the message itself.  This kind of packing can be achieved with
C<pack("l! a*", $type, $message)>.  Returns true if successful,
or false if there is an error.  See also C<IPC::SysV>
and C<IPC::SysV::Msg> documentation.

=item my EXPR

=item my TYPE EXPR

=item my EXPR : ATTRS

=item my TYPE EXPR : ATTRS

A C<my> declares the listed variables to be local (lexically) to the
enclosing block, file, or C<eval>.  If more than one value is listed,
the list must be placed in parentheses.

The exact semantics and interface of TYPE and ATTRS are still
evolving.  TYPE is currently bound to the use of C<fields> pragma,
and attributes are handled using the C<attributes> pragma, or starting
from Perl 5.8.0 also via the C<Attribute::Handlers> module.  See
L<perlsub/"Private Variables via my()"> for details, and L<fields>,
L<attributes>, and L<Attribute::Handlers>.

=item next LABEL

=item next

The C<next> command is like the C<continue> statement in C; it starts
the next iteration of the loop:

    LINE: while (<STDIN>) {
        next LINE if /^#/;      # discard comments
        #...
    }

Note that if there were a C<continue> block on the above, it would get
executed even on discarded lines.  If the LABEL is omitted, the command
refers to the innermost enclosing loop.

C<next> cannot be used to exit a block which returns a value such as
C<eval {}>, C<sub {}> or C<do {}>, and should not be used to exit
a grep() or map() operation.

Note that a block by itself is semantically identical to a loop
that executes once.  Thus C<next> will exit such a block early.

See also L</continue> for an illustration of how C<last>, C<next>, and
C<redo> work.

=item no Module VERSION LIST

=item no Module VERSION

=item no Module LIST

=item no Module

See the C<use> function, of which C<no> is the opposite.

=item oct EXPR

=item oct

Interprets EXPR as an octal string and returns the corresponding
value.  (If EXPR happens to start off with C<0x>, interprets it as a
hex string.  If EXPR starts off with C<0b>, it is interpreted as a
binary string.  Leading whitespace is ignored in all three cases.)
The following will handle decimal, binary, octal, and hex in the standard
Perl or C notation:

    $val = oct($val) if $val =~ /^0/;

If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.   To go the other way (produce a number
in octal), use sprintf() or printf():

    $perms = (stat("filename"))[2] & 07777;
    $oct_perms = sprintf "%lo", $perms;

The oct() function is commonly used when a string such as C<644> needs
to be converted into a file mode, for example. (Although perl will
automatically convert strings into numbers as needed, this automatic
conversion assumes base 10.)

=item open FILEHANDLE,EXPR

=item open FILEHANDLE,MODE,EXPR

=item open FILEHANDLE,MODE,EXPR,LIST

=item open FILEHANDLE,MODE,REFERENCE

=item open FILEHANDLE

Opens the file whose filename is given by EXPR, and associates it with
FILEHANDLE.

(The following is a comprehensive reference to open(): for a gentler
introduction you may consider L<perlopentut>.)

If FILEHANDLE is an undefined scalar variable (or array or hash element)
the variable is assigned a reference to a new anonymous filehandle,
otherwise if FILEHANDLE is an expression, its value is used as the name of
the real filehandle wanted.  (This is considered a symbolic reference, so
C<use strict 'refs'> should I<not> be in effect.)

If EXPR is omitted, the scalar variable of the same name as the
FILEHANDLE contains the filename.  (Note that lexical variables--those
declared with C<my>--will not work for this purpose; so if you're
using C<my>, specify EXPR in your call to open.)

If three or more arguments are specified then the mode of opening and
the file name are separate. If MODE is C<< '<' >> or nothing, the file
is opened for input.  If MODE is C<< '>' >>, the file is truncated and
opened for output, being created if necessary.  If MODE is C<<< '>>' >>>,
the file is opened for appending, again being created if necessary.

You can put a C<'+'> in front of the C<< '>' >> or C<< '<' >> to
indicate that you want both read and write access to the file; thus
C<< '+<' >> is almost always preferred for read/write updates--the C<<
'+>' >> mode would clobber the file first.  You can't usually use
either read-write mode for updating textfiles, since they have
variable length records.  See the B<-i> switch in L<perlrun> for a
better approach.  The file is created with permissions of C<0666>
modified by the process' C<umask> value.

These various prefixes correspond to the fopen(3) modes of C<'r'>,
C<'r+'>, C<'w'>, C<'w+'>, C<'a'>, and C<'a+'>.

In the 2-arguments (and 1-argument) form of the call the mode and
filename should be concatenated (in this order), possibly separated by
spaces.  It is possible to omit the mode in these forms if the mode is
C<< '<' >>.

If the filename begins with C<'|'>, the filename is interpreted as a
command to which output is to be piped, and if the filename ends with a
C<'|'>, the filename is interpreted as a command which pipes output to
us.  See L<perlipc/"Using open() for IPC">
for more examples of this.  (You are not allowed to C<open> to a command
that pipes both in I<and> out, but see L<IPC::Open2>, L<IPC::Open3>,
and L<perlipc/"Bidirectional Communication with Another Process">
for alternatives.)

For three or more arguments if MODE is C<'|-'>, the filename is
interpreted as a command to which output is to be piped, and if MODE
is C<'-|'>, the filename is interpreted as a command which pipes
output to us.  In the 2-arguments (and 1-argument) form one should
replace dash (C<'-'>) with the command.
See L<perlipc/"Using open() for IPC"> for more examples of this.
(You are not allowed to C<open> to a command that pipes both in I<and>
out, but see L<IPC::Open2>, L<IPC::Open3>, and
L<perlipc/"Bidirectional Communication"> for alternatives.)

In the three-or-more argument form of pipe opens, if LIST is specified
(extra arguments after the command name) then LIST becomes arguments
to the command invoked if the platform supports it.  The meaning of
C<open> with more than three arguments for non-pipe modes is not yet
specified. Experimental "layers" may give extra LIST arguments
meaning.

In the 2-arguments (and 1-argument) form opening C<'-'> opens STDIN
and opening C<< '>-' >> opens STDOUT.

You may use the three-argument form of open to specify IO "layers"
(sometimes also referred to as "disciplines") to be applied to the handle
that affect how the input and output are processed (see L<open> and
L<PerlIO> for more details). For example

  open(FH, "<:utf8", "file")

will open the UTF-8 encoded file containing Unicode characters,
see L<perluniintro>. (Note that if layers are specified in the
three-arg form then default layers set by the C<open> pragma are
ignored.)

Open returns nonzero upon success, the undefined value otherwise.  If
the C<open> involved a pipe, the return value happens to be the pid of
the subprocess.

If you're running Perl on a system that distinguishes between text
files and binary files, then you should check out L</binmode> for tips
for dealing with this.  The key distinction between systems that need
C<binmode> and those that don't is their text file formats.  Systems
like Unix, Mac OS, and Plan 9, which delimit lines with a single
character, and which encode that character in C as C<"\n">, do not
need C<binmode>.  The rest need it.

When opening a file, it's usually a bad idea to continue normal execution
if the request failed, so C<open> is frequently used in connection with
C<die>.  Even if C<die> won't do what you want (say, in a CGI script,
where you want to make a nicely formatted error message (but there are
modules that can help with that problem)) you should always check
the return value from opening a file.  The infrequent exception is when
working with an unopened filehandle is actually what you want to do.

As a special case the 3 arg form with a read/write mode and the third
argument being C<undef>:

    open(TMP, "+>", undef) or die ...

opens a filehandle to an anonymous temporary file.  Also using "+<"
works for symmetry, but you really should consider writing something
to the temporary file first.  You will need to seek() to do the
reading.

Since v5.8.0, perl has built using PerlIO by default.  Unless you've
changed this (ie Configure -Uuseperlio), you can open file handles to
"in memory" files held in Perl scalars via:

    open($fh, '>', \$variable) || ..

Though if you try to re-open C<STDOUT> or C<STDERR> as an "in memory"
file, you have to close it first:

    close STDOUT;
    open STDOUT, '>', \$variable or die "Can't open STDOUT: $!";

Examples:

    $ARTICLE = 100;
    open ARTICLE or die "Can't find article $ARTICLE: $!\n";
    while (<ARTICLE>) {...

    open(LOG, '>>/usr/spool/news/twitlog');     # (log is reserved)
    # if the open fails, output is discarded

    open(DBASE, '+<', 'dbase.mine')             # open for update
        or die "Can't open 'dbase.mine' for update: $!";

    open(DBASE, '+<dbase.mine')                 # ditto
        or die "Can't open 'dbase.mine' for update: $!";

    open(ARTICLE, '-|', "caesar <$article")     # decrypt article
        or die "Can't start caesar: $!";

    open(ARTICLE, "caesar <$article |")         # ditto
        or die "Can't start caesar: $!";

    open(EXTRACT, "|sort >Tmp$$")               # $$ is our process id
        or die "Can't start sort: $!";

    # in memory files
    open(MEMORY,'>', \$var)
        or die "Can't open memory file: $!";
    print MEMORY "foo!\n";                      # output will end up in $var

    # process argument list of files along with any includes

    foreach $file (@ARGV) {
        process($file, 'fh00');
    }

    sub process {
        my($filename, $input) = @_;
        $input++;               # this is a string increment
        unless (open($input, $filename)) {
            print STDERR "Can't open $filename: $!\n";
            return;
        }

        local $_;
        while (<$input>) {              # note use of indirection
            if (/^#include "(.*)"/) {
                process($1, $input);
                next;
            }
            #...                # whatever
        }
    }

See L<perliol> for detailed info on PerlIO.

You may also, in the Bourne shell tradition, specify an EXPR beginning
with C<< '>&' >>, in which case the rest of the string is interpreted
as the name of a filehandle (or file descriptor, if numeric) to be
duped (as L<dup(2)>) and opened.  You may use C<&> after C<< > >>,
C<<< >> >>>, C<< < >>, C<< +> >>, C<<< +>> >>>, and C<< +< >>.
The mode you specify should match the mode of the original filehandle.
(Duping a filehandle does not take into account any existing contents
of IO buffers.) If you use the 3 arg form then you can pass either a
number, the name of a filehandle or the normal "reference to a glob".

Here is a script that saves, redirects, and restores C<STDOUT> and
C<STDERR> using various methods:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    open my $oldout, ">&STDOUT"     or die "Can't dup STDOUT: $!";
    open OLDERR,     ">&", \*STDERR or die "Can't dup STDERR: $!";

    open STDOUT, '>', "foo.out" or die "Can't redirect STDOUT: $!";
    open STDERR, ">&STDOUT"     or die "Can't dup STDOUT: $!";

    select STDERR; $| = 1;      # make unbuffered
    select STDOUT; $| = 1;      # make unbuffered

    print STDOUT "stdout 1\n";  # this works for
    print STDERR "stderr 1\n";  # subprocesses too

    open STDOUT, ">&", $oldout or die "Can't dup \$oldout: $!";
    open STDERR, ">&OLDERR"    or die "Can't dup OLDERR: $!";

    print STDOUT "stdout 2\n";
    print STDERR "stderr 2\n";

If you specify C<< '<&=X' >>, where C<X> is a file descriptor number
or a filehandle, then Perl will do an equivalent of C's C<fdopen> of
that file descriptor (and not call L<dup(2)>); this is more
parsimonious of file descriptors.  For example:

    # open for input, reusing the fileno of $fd
    open(FILEHANDLE, "<&=$fd")

or

    open(FILEHANDLE, "<&=", $fd)

or

    # open for append, using the fileno of OLDFH
    open(FH, ">>&=", OLDFH)

or

    open(FH, ">>&=OLDFH")

Being parsimonious on filehandles is also useful (besides being
parsimonious) for example when something is dependent on file
descriptors, like for example locking using flock().  If you do just
C<< open(A, '>>&B') >>, the filehandle A will not have the same file
descriptor as B, and therefore flock(A) will not flock(B), and vice
versa.  But with C<< open(A, '>>&=B') >> the filehandles will share
the same file descriptor.

Note that if you are using Perls older than 5.8.0, Perl will be using
the standard C libraries' fdopen() to implement the "=" functionality.
On many UNIX systems fdopen() fails when file descriptors exceed a
certain value, typically 255.  For Perls 5.8.0 and later, PerlIO is
most often the default.

You can see whether Perl has been compiled with PerlIO or not by
running C<perl -V> and looking for C<useperlio=> line.  If C<useperlio>
is C<define>, you have PerlIO, otherwise you don't.

If you open a pipe on the command C<'-'>, i.e., either C<'|-'> or C<'-|'>
with 2-arguments (or 1-argument) form of open(), then
there is an implicit fork done, and the return value of open is the pid
of the child within the parent process, and C<0> within the child
process.  (Use C<defined($pid)> to determine whether the open was successful.)
The filehandle behaves normally for the parent, but i/o to that
filehandle is piped from/to the STDOUT/STDIN of the child process.
In the child process the filehandle isn't opened--i/o happens from/to
the new STDOUT or STDIN.  Typically this is used like the normal
piped open when you want to exercise more control over just how the
pipe command gets executed, such as when you are running setuid, and
don't want to have to scan shell commands for metacharacters.
The following triples are more or less equivalent:

    open(FOO, "|tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'");
    open(FOO, '|-', "tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'");
    open(FOO, '|-') || exec 'tr', '[a-z]', '[A-Z]';
    open(FOO, '|-', "tr", '[a-z]', '[A-Z]');

    open(FOO, "cat -n '$file'|");
    open(FOO, '-|', "cat -n '$file'");
    open(FOO, '-|') || exec 'cat', '-n', $file;
    open(FOO, '-|', "cat", '-n', $file);

The last example in each block shows the pipe as "list form", which is
not yet supported on all platforms.  A good rule of thumb is that if
your platform has true C<fork()> (in other words, if your platform is
UNIX) you can use the list form.

See L<perlipc/"Safe Pipe Opens"> for more examples of this.

Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for
output before any operation that may do a fork, but this may not be
supported on some platforms (see L<perlport>).  To be safe, you may need
to set C<$|> ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the C<autoflush()> method
of C<IO::Handle> on any open handles.

On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will
be set for the newly opened file descriptor as determined by the value
of $^F.  See L<perlvar/$^F>.

Closing any piped filehandle causes the parent process to wait for the
child to finish, and returns the status value in C<$?>.

The filename passed to 2-argument (or 1-argument) form of open() will
have leading and trailing whitespace deleted, and the normal
redirection characters honored.  This property, known as "magic open",
can often be used to good effect.  A user could specify a filename of
F<"rsh cat file |">, or you could change certain filenames as needed:

    $filename =~ s/(.*\.gz)\s*$/gzip -dc < $1|/;
    open(FH, $filename) or die "Can't open $filename: $!";

Use 3-argument form to open a file with arbitrary weird characters in it,

    open(FOO, '<', $file);

otherwise it's necessary to protect any leading and trailing whitespace:

    $file =~ s#^(\s)#./$1#;
    open(FOO, "< $file\0");

(this may not work on some bizarre filesystems).  One should
conscientiously choose between the I<magic> and 3-arguments form
of open():

    open IN, $ARGV[0];

will allow the user to specify an argument of the form C<"rsh cat file |">,
but will not work on a filename which happens to have a trailing space, while

    open IN, '<', $ARGV[0];

will have exactly the opposite restrictions.

If you want a "real" C C<open> (see L<open(2)> on your system), then you
should use the C<sysopen> function, which involves no such magic (but
may use subtly different filemodes than Perl open(), which is mapped
to C fopen()).  This is
another way to protect your filenames from interpretation.  For example:

    use IO::Handle;
    sysopen(HANDLE, $path, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL)
        or die "sysopen $path: $!";
    $oldfh = select(HANDLE); $| = 1; select($oldfh);
    print HANDLE "stuff $$\n";
    seek(HANDLE, 0, 0);
    print "File contains: ", <HANDLE>;

Using the constructor from the C<IO::Handle> package (or one of its
subclasses, such as C<IO::File> or C<IO::Socket>), you can generate anonymous
filehandles that have the scope of whatever variables hold references to
them, and automatically close whenever and however you leave that scope:

    use IO::File;
    #...
    sub read_myfile_munged {
        my $ALL = shift;
        my $handle = new IO::File;
        open($handle, "myfile") or die "myfile: $!";
        $first = <$handle>
            or return ();     # Automatically closed here.
        mung $first or die "mung failed";       # Or here.
        return $first, <$handle> if $ALL;       # Or here.
        $first;                                 # Or here.
    }

See L</seek> for some details about mixing reading and writing.

=item opendir DIRHANDLE,EXPR

Opens a directory named EXPR for processing by C<readdir>, C<telldir>,
C<seekdir>, C<rewinddir>, and C<closedir>.  Returns true if successful.
DIRHANDLE may be an expression whose value can be used as an indirect
dirhandle, usually the real dirhandle name.  If DIRHANDLE is an undefined
scalar variable (or array or hash element), the variable is assigned a
reference to a new anonymous dirhandle.
DIRHANDLEs have their own namespace separate from FILEHANDLEs.

=item ord EXPR

=item ord

Returns the numeric (the native 8-bit encoding, like ASCII or EBCDIC,
or Unicode) value of the first character of EXPR.  If EXPR is omitted,
uses C<$_>.

For the reverse, see L</chr>.
See L<perlunicode> and L<encoding> for more about Unicode.

=item our EXPR

=item our EXPR TYPE

=item our EXPR : ATTRS

=item our TYPE EXPR : ATTRS

An C<our> declares the listed variables to be valid globals within
the enclosing block, file, or C<eval>.  That is, it has the same
scoping rules as a "my" declaration, but does not create a local
variable.  If more than one value is listed, the list must be placed
in parentheses.  The C<our> declaration has no semantic effect unless
"use strict vars" is in effect, in which case it lets you use the
declared global variable without qualifying it with a package name.
(But only within the lexical scope of the C<our> declaration.  In this
it differs from "use vars", which is package scoped.)

An C<our> declaration declares a global variable that will be visible
across its entire lexical scope, even across package boundaries.  The
package in which the variable is entered is determined at the point
of the declaration, not at the point of use.  This means the following
behavior holds:

    package Foo;
    our $bar;           # declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope
    $bar = 20;

    package Bar;
    print $bar;         # prints 20

Multiple C<our> declarations in the same lexical scope are allowed
if they are in different packages.  If they happened to be in the same
package, Perl will emit warnings if you have asked for them.

    use warnings;
    package Foo;
    our $bar;           # declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope
    $bar = 20;

    package Bar;
    our $bar = 30;      # declares $Bar::bar for rest of lexical scope
    print $bar;         # prints 30

    our $bar;           # emits warning

An C<our> declaration may also have a list of attributes associated
with it.

The exact semantics and interface of TYPE and ATTRS are still
evolving.  TYPE is currently bound to the use of C<fields> pragma,
and attributes are handled using the C<attributes> pragma, or starting
from Perl 5.8.0 also via the C<Attribute::Handlers> module.  See
L<perlsub/"Private Variables via my()"> for details, and L<fields>,
L<attributes>, and L<Attribute::Handlers>.

The only currently recognized C<our()> attribute is C<unique> which
indicates that a single copy of the global is to be used by all
interpreters should the program happen to be running in a
multi-interpreter environment. (The default behaviour would be for
each interpreter to have its own copy of the global.)  Examples:

    our @EXPORT : unique = qw(foo);
    our %EXPORT_TAGS : unique = (bar => [qw(aa bb cc)]);
    our $VERSION : unique = "1.00";

Note that this attribute also has the effect of making the global
readonly when the first new interpreter is cloned (for example,
when the first new thread is created).

Multi-interpreter environments can come to being either through the
fork() emulation on Windows platforms, or by embedding perl in a
multi-threaded application.  The C<unique> attribute does nothing in
all other environments.

Warning: the current implementation of this attribute operates on the
typeglob associated with the variable; this means that C<our $x : unique>
also has the effect of C<our @x : unique; our %x : unique>. This may be
subject to change.

=item pack TEMPLATE,LIST

Takes a LIST of values and converts it into a string using the rules
given by the TEMPLATE.  The resulting string is the concatenation of
the converted values.  Typically, each converted value looks
like its machine-level representation.  For example, on 32-bit machines
an integer may be represented by a sequence of 4 bytes which will be 
converted to a sequence of 4 characters.

The TEMPLATE is a sequence of characters that give the order and type
of values, as follows:

    a   A string with arbitrary binary data, will be null padded.
    A   A text (ASCII) string, will be space padded.
    Z   A null terminated (ASCIZ) string, will be null padded.

    b   A bit string (ascending bit order inside each byte, like vec()).
    B   A bit string (descending bit order inside each byte).
    h   A hex string (low nybble first).
    H   A hex string (high nybble first).

    c   A signed char (8-bit) value.
    C   An unsigned C char (octet) even under Unicode. Should normally not
        be used. See U and W instead.
    W   An unsigned char value (can be greater than 255).

    s   A signed short (16-bit) value.
    S   An unsigned short value.

    l   A signed long (32-bit) value.
    L   An unsigned long value.

    q   A signed quad (64-bit) value.
    Q   An unsigned quad value.
          (Quads are available only if your system supports 64-bit
           integer values _and_ if Perl has been compiled to support those.
           Causes a fatal error otherwise.)

    i   A signed integer value.
    I   A unsigned integer value.
          (This 'integer' is _at_least_ 32 bits wide.  Its exact
           size depends on what a local C compiler calls 'int'.)
 
    n   An unsigned short (16-bit) in "network" (big-endian) order.
    N   An unsigned long (32-bit) in "network" (big-endian) order.
    v   An unsigned short (16-bit) in "VAX" (little-endian) order.
    V   An unsigned long (32-bit) in "VAX" (little-endian) order.

    j   A Perl internal signed integer value (IV).
    J   A Perl internal unsigned integer value (UV).

    f   A single-precision float in the native format.
    d   A double-precision float in the native format.

    F   A Perl internal floating point value (NV) in the native format
    D   A long double-precision float in the native format.
          (Long doubles are available only if your system supports long
           double values _and_ if Perl has been compiled to support those.
           Causes a fatal error otherwise.)

    p   A pointer to a null-terminated string.
    P   A pointer to a structure (fixed-length string).

    u   A uuencoded string.
    U   A Unicode character number.  Encodes to UTF-8 internally
        (or UTF-EBCDIC in EBCDIC platforms).

    w   A BER compressed integer (not an ASN.1 BER, see perlpacktut for
        details).  Its bytes represent an unsigned integer in base 128,
        most significant digit first, with as few digits as possible.  Bit
        eight (the high bit) is set on each byte except the last.

    x   A null byte.
    X   Back up a byte.
    @   Null fill or truncate to absolute position, counted from the
        start of the innermost ()-group.
    .   Null fill or truncate to absolute position specified by value.
    (   Start of a ()-group.

Some letters in the TEMPLATE may optionally be followed by one or
more of these modifiers (the second column lists the letters for
which the modifier is valid):

    !   sSlLiI     Forces native (short, long, int) sizes instead
                   of fixed (16-/32-bit) sizes.

        xX         Make x and X act as alignment commands.

        nNvV       Treat integers as signed instead of unsigned.

        @.         Specify position as byte offset in the internal
                   representation of the packed string. Efficient but
                   dangerous.

    >   sSiIlLqQ   Force big-endian byte-order on the type.
        jJfFdDpP   (The "big end" touches the construct.)

    <   sSiIlLqQ   Force little-endian byte-order on the type.
        jJfFdDpP   (The "little end" touches the construct.)

The C<E<gt>> and C<E<lt>> modifiers can also be used on C<()>-groups,
in which case they force a certain byte-order on all components of
that group, including subgroups.

The following rules apply:

=over 8

=item *

Each letter may optionally be followed by a number giving a repeat
count.  With all types except C<a>, C<A>, C<Z>, C<b>, C<B>, C<h>,
C<H>, C<@>, C<.>, C<x>, C<X> and C<P> the pack function will gobble up
that many values from the LIST.  A C<*> for the repeat count means to
use however many items are left, except for C<@>, C<x>, C<X>, where it
is equivalent to C<0>, for <.> where it means relative to string start
and C<u>, where it is equivalent to 1 (or 45, which is the same).
A numeric repeat count may optionally be enclosed in brackets, as in
C<pack 'C[80]', @arr>.

One can replace the numeric repeat count by a template enclosed in brackets;
then the packed length of this template in bytes is used as a count.
For example, C<x[L]> skips a long (it skips the number of bytes in a long);
the template C<$t X[$t] $t> unpack()s twice what $t unpacks.
If the template in brackets contains alignment commands (such as C<x![d]>),
its packed length is calculated as if the start of the template has the maximal
possible alignment.

When used with C<Z>, C<*> results in the addition of a trailing null
byte (so the packed result will be one longer than the byte C<length>
of the item).

When used with C<@>, the repeat count represents an offset from the start
of the innermost () group.

When used with C<.>, the repeat count is used to determine the starting
position from where the value offset is calculated. If the repeat count
is 0, it's relative to the current position. If the repeat count is C<*>,
the offset is relative to the start of the packed string. And if its an
integer C<n> the offset is relative to the start of the n-th innermost
() group (or the start of the string if C<n> is bigger then the group
level).

The repeat count for C<u> is interpreted as the maximal number of bytes
to encode per line of output, with 0, 1 and 2 replaced by 45. The repeat 
count should not be more than 65.

=item *

The C<a>, C<A>, and C<Z> types gobble just one value, but pack it as a
string of length count, padding with nulls or spaces as necessary.  When
unpacking, C<A> strips trailing whitespace and nulls, C<Z> strips everything
after the first null, and C<a> returns data verbatim.

If the value-to-pack is too long, it is truncated.  If too long and an
explicit count is provided, C<Z> packs only C<$count-1> bytes, followed
by a null byte.  Thus C<Z> always packs a trailing null (except when the
count is 0).

=item *

Likewise, the C<b> and C<B> fields pack a string that many bits long.
Each character of the input field of pack() generates 1 bit of the result.
Each result bit is based on the least-significant bit of the corresponding
input character, i.e., on C<ord($char)%2>.  In particular, characters C<"0">
and C<"1"> generate bits 0 and 1, as do characters C<"\0"> and C<"\1">.

Starting from the beginning of the input string of pack(), each 8-tuple
of characters is converted to 1 character of output.  With format C<b>
the first character of the 8-tuple determines the least-significant bit of a
character, and with format C<B> it determines the most-significant bit of
a character.

If the length of the input string is not exactly divisible by 8, the
remainder is packed as if the input string were padded by null characters
at the end.  Similarly, during unpack()ing the "extra" bits are ignored.

If the input string of pack() is longer than needed, extra characters are 
ignored. A C<*> for the repeat count of pack() means to use all the 
characters of the input field.  On unpack()ing the bits are converted to a 
string of C<"0">s and C<"1">s.

=item *

The C<h> and C<H> fields pack a string that many nybbles (4-bit groups,
representable as hexadecimal digits, 0-9a-f) long.

Each character of the input field of pack() generates 4 bits of the result.
For non-alphabetical characters the result is based on the 4 least-significant
bits of the input character, i.e., on C<ord($char)%16>.  In particular,
characters C<"0"> and C<"1"> generate nybbles 0 and 1, as do bytes
C<"\0"> and C<"\1">.  For characters C<"a".."f"> and C<"A".."F"> the result
is compatible with the usual hexadecimal digits, so that C<"a"> and
C<"A"> both generate the nybble C<0xa==10>.  The result for characters
C<"g".."z"> and C<"G".."Z"> is not well-defined.

Starting from the beginning of the input string of pack(), each pair
of characters is converted to 1 character of output.  With format C<h> the
first character of the pair determines the least-significant nybble of the
output character, and with format C<H> it determines the most-significant
nybble.

If the length of the input string is not even, it behaves as if padded
by a null character at the end.  Similarly, during unpack()ing the "extra"
nybbles are ignored.

If the input string of pack() is longer than needed, extra characters are
ignored.
A C<*> for the repeat count of pack() means to use all the characters of
the input field.  On unpack()ing the nybbles are converted to a string
of hexadecimal digits.

=item *

The C<p> type packs a pointer to a null-terminated string.  You are
responsible for ensuring the string is not a temporary value (which can
potentially get deallocated before you get around to using the packed result).
The C<P> type packs a pointer to a structure of the size indicated by the
length.  A NULL pointer is created if the corresponding value for C<p> or
C<P> is C<undef>, similarly for unpack().

If your system has a strange pointer size (i.e. a pointer is neither as
big as an int nor as big as a long), it may not be possible to pack or
unpack pointers in big- or little-endian byte order.  Attempting to do
so will result in a fatal error.

=item *

The C</> template character allows packing and unpacking of a sequence of
items where the packed structure contains a packed item count followed by 
the packed items themselves.
You write I<length-item>C</>I<sequence-item>.

The I<length-item> can be any C<pack> template letter, and describes
how the length value is packed.  The ones likely to be of most use are
integer-packing ones like C<n> (for Java strings), C<w> (for ASN.1 or
SNMP) and C<N> (for Sun XDR).

For C<pack>, the I<sequence-item> may have a repeat count, in which case
the minimum of that and the number of available items is used as argument
for the I<length-item>. If it has no repeat count or uses a '*', the number
of available items is used. For C<unpack> the repeat count is always obtained
by decoding the packed item count, and the I<sequence-item> must not have a
repeat count.

If the I<sequence-item> refers to a string type (C<"A">, C<"a"> or C<"Z">),
the I<length-item> is a string length, not a number of strings. If there is
an explicit repeat count for pack, the packed string will be adjusted to that
given length.

    unpack 'W/a', "\04Gurusamy";        gives ('Guru')
    unpack 'a3/A* A*', '007 Bond  J ';  gives (' Bond', 'J')
    pack 'n/a* w/a','hello,','world';   gives "\000\006hello,\005world"
    pack 'a/W2', ord('a') .. ord('z');  gives '2ab'

The I<length-item> is not returned explicitly from C<unpack>.

Adding a count to the I<length-item> letter is unlikely to do anything
useful, unless that letter is C<A>, C<a> or C<Z>.  Packing with a
I<length-item> of C<a> or C<Z> may introduce C<"\000"> characters,
which Perl does not regard as legal in numeric strings.

=item *

The integer types C<s>, C<S>, C<l>, and C<L> may be
followed by a C<!> modifier to signify native shorts or
longs--as you can see from above for example a bare C<l> does mean
exactly 32 bits, the native C<long> (as seen by the local C compiler)
may be larger.  This is an issue mainly in 64-bit platforms.  You can
see whether using C<!> makes any difference by

        print length(pack("s")), " ", length(pack("s!")), "\n";
        print length(pack("l")), " ", length(pack("l!")), "\n";

C<i!> and C<I!> also work but only because of completeness;
they are identical to C<i> and C<I>.

The actual sizes (in bytes) of native shorts, ints, longs, and long
longs on the platform where Perl was built are also available via
L<Config>:

       use Config;
       print $Config{shortsize},    "\n";
       print $Config{intsize},      "\n";
       print $Config{longsize},     "\n";
       print $Config{longlongsize}, "\n";

(The C<$Config{longlongsize}> will be undefined if your system does
not support long longs.)

=item *

The integer formats C<s>, C<S>, C<i>, C<I>, C<l>, C<L>, C<j>, and C<J>
are inherently non-portable between processors and operating systems
because they obey the native byteorder and endianness.  For example a
4-byte integer 0x12345678 (305419896 decimal) would be ordered natively
(arranged in and handled by the CPU registers) into bytes as

        0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78     # big-endian
        0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12     # little-endian

Basically, the Intel and VAX CPUs are little-endian, while everybody
else, for example Motorola m68k/88k, PPC, Sparc, HP PA, Power, and
Cray are big-endian.  Alpha and MIPS can be either: Digital/Compaq
used/uses them in little-endian mode; SGI/Cray uses them in big-endian
mode.

The names `big-endian' and `little-endian' are comic references to
the classic "Gulliver's Travels" (via the paper "On Holy Wars and a
Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, April 1, 1980) and
the egg-eating habits of the Lilliputians.

Some systems may have even weirder byte orders such as

        0x56 0x78 0x12 0x34
        0x34 0x12 0x78 0x56

You can see your system's preference with

        print join(" ", map { sprintf "%#02x", $_ }
                            unpack("W*",pack("L",0x12345678))), "\n";

The byteorder on the platform where Perl was built is also available
via L<Config>:

        use Config;
        print $Config{byteorder}, "\n";

Byteorders C<'1234'> and C<'12345678'> are little-endian, C<'4321'>
and C<'87654321'> are big-endian.

If you want portable packed integers you can either use the formats
C<n>, C<N>, C<v>, and C<V>, or you can use the C<E<gt>> and C<E<lt>>
modifiers.  These modifiers are only available as of perl 5.9.2.
See also L<perlport>.

=item *

All integer and floating point formats as well as C<p> and C<P> and
C<()>-groups may be followed by the C<E<gt>> or C<E<lt>> modifiers
to force big- or little- endian byte-order, respectively.
This is especially useful, since C<n>, C<N>, C<v> and C<V> don't cover
signed integers, 64-bit integers and floating point values.  However,
there are some things to keep in mind.

Exchanging signed integers between different platforms only works
if all platforms store them in the same format.  Most platforms store
signed integers in two's complement, so usually this is not an issue.

The C<E<gt>> or C<E<lt>> modifiers can only be used on floating point
formats on big- or little-endian machines.  Otherwise, attempting to
do so will result in a fatal error.

Forcing big- or little-endian byte-order on floating point values for
data exchange can only work if all platforms are using the same
binary representation (e.g. IEEE floating point format).  Even if all
platforms are using IEEE, there may be subtle differences.  Being able
to use C<E<gt>> or C<E<lt>> on floating point values can be very useful,
but also very dangerous if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
It is definetely not a general way to portably store floating point
values.

When using C<E<gt>> or C<E<lt>> on an C<()>-group, this will affect
all types inside the group that accept the byte-order modifiers,
including all subgroups.  It will silently be ignored for all other
types.  You are not allowed to override the byte-order within a group
that already has a byte-order modifier suffix.

=item *

Real numbers (floats and doubles) are in the native machine format only;
due to the multiplicity of floating formats around, and the lack of a
standard "network" representation, no facility for interchange has been
made.  This means that packed floating point data written on one machine
may not be readable on another - even if both use IEEE floating point
arithmetic (as the endian-ness of the memory representation is not part
of the IEEE spec).  See also L<perlport>.

If you know exactly what you're doing, you can use the C<E<gt>> or C<E<lt>>
modifiers to force big- or little-endian byte-order on floating point values.

Note that Perl uses doubles (or long doubles, if configured) internally for
all numeric calculation, and converting from double into float and thence back
to double again will lose precision (i.e., C<unpack("f", pack("f", $foo)>)
will not in general equal $foo).

=item *

Pack and unpack can operate in two modes, character mode (C<C0> mode) where
the packed string is processed per character and UTF-8 mode (C<U0> mode)
where the packed string is processed in its UTF-8-encoded Unicode form on
a byte by byte basis. Character mode is the default unless the format string 
starts with an C<U>. You can switch mode at any moment with an explicit 
C<C0> or C<U0> in the format. A mode is in effect until the next mode switch 
or until the end of the ()-group in which it was entered.

=item *

You must yourself do any alignment or padding by inserting for example
enough C<'x'>es while packing.  There is no way to pack() and unpack()
could know where the characters are going to or coming from.  Therefore
C<pack> (and C<unpack>) handle their output and input as flat
sequences of characters.

=item *

A ()-group is a sub-TEMPLATE enclosed in parentheses.  A group may
take a repeat count, both as postfix, and for unpack() also via the C</>
template character. Within each repetition of a group, positioning with
C<@> starts again at 0. Therefore, the result of

    pack( '@1A((@2A)@3A)', 'a', 'b', 'c' )

is the string "\0a\0\0bc".

=item *

C<x> and C<X> accept C<!> modifier.  In this case they act as
alignment commands: they jump forward/back to the closest position
aligned at a multiple of C<count> characters. For example, to pack() or
unpack() C's C<struct {char c; double d; char cc[2]}> one may need to
use the template C<W x![d] d W[2]>; this assumes that doubles must be
aligned on the double's size.

For alignment commands C<count> of 0 is equivalent to C<count> of 1;
both result in no-ops.

=item *

C<n>, C<N>, C<v> and C<V> accept the C<!> modifier. In this case they
will represent signed 16-/32-bit integers in big-/little-endian order.
This is only portable if all platforms sharing the packed data use the
same binary representation for signed integers (e.g. all platforms are
using two's complement representation).

=item *

A comment in a TEMPLATE starts with C<#> and goes to the end of line.
White space may be used to separate pack codes from each other, but
modifiers and a repeat count must follow immediately.

=item *

If TEMPLATE requires more arguments to pack() than actually given, pack()
assumes additional C<""> arguments.  If TEMPLATE requires less arguments
to pack() than actually given, extra arguments are ignored.

=back

Examples:

    $foo = pack("WWWW",65,66,67,68);
    # foo eq "ABCD"
    $foo = pack("W4",65,66,67,68);
    # same thing
    $foo = pack("W4",0x24b6,0x24b7,0x24b8,0x24b9);
    # same thing with Unicode circled letters.
    $foo = pack("U4",0x24b6,0x24b7,0x24b8,0x24b9);
    # same thing with Unicode circled letters. You don't get the UTF-8
    # bytes because the U at the start of the format caused a switch to
    # U0-mode, so the UTF-8 bytes get joined into characters
    $foo = pack("C0U4",0x24b6,0x24b7,0x24b8,0x24b9);
    # foo eq "\xe2\x92\xb6\xe2\x92\xb7\xe2\x92\xb8\xe2\x92\xb9"
    # This is the UTF-8 encoding of the string in the previous example

    $foo = pack("ccxxcc",65,66,67,68);
    # foo eq "AB\0\0CD"

    # note: the above examples featuring "W" and "c" are true
    # only on ASCII and ASCII-derived systems such as ISO Latin 1
    # and UTF-8.  In EBCDIC the first example would be
    # $foo = pack("WWWW",193,194,195,196);

    $foo = pack("s2",1,2);
    # "\1\0\2\0" on little-endian
    # "\0\1\0\2" on big-endian

    $foo = pack("a4","abcd","x","y","z");
    # "abcd"

    $foo = pack("aaaa","abcd","x","y","z");
    # "axyz"

    $foo = pack("a14","abcdefg");
    # "abcdefg\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"

    $foo = pack("i9pl", gmtime);
    # a real struct tm (on my system anyway)

    $utmp_template = "Z8 Z8 Z16 L";
    $utmp = pack($utmp_template, @utmp1);
    # a struct utmp (BSDish)

    @utmp2 = unpack($utmp_template, $utmp);
    # "@utmp1" eq "@utmp2"

    sub bintodec {
        unpack("N", pack("B32", substr("0" x 32 . shift, -32)));
    }

    $foo = pack('sx2l', 12, 34);
    # short 12, two zero bytes padding, long 34
    $bar = pack('s@4l', 12, 34);
    # short 12, zero fill to position 4, long 34
    # $foo eq $bar
    $baz = pack('s.l', 12, 4, 34);
    # short 12, zero fill to position 4, long 34

    $foo = pack('nN', 42, 4711);
    # pack big-endian 16- and 32-bit unsigned integers
    $foo = pack('S>L>', 42, 4711);
    # exactly the same
    $foo = pack('s<l<', -42, 4711);
    # pack little-endian 16- and 32-bit signed integers
    $foo = pack('(sl)<', -42, 4711);
    # exactly the same

The same template may generally also be used in unpack().

=item package NAMESPACE

=item package

Declares the compilation unit as being in the given namespace.  The scope
of the package declaration is from the declaration itself through the end
of the enclosing block, file, or eval (the same as the C<my> operator).
All further unqualified dynamic identifiers will be in this namespace.
A package statement affects only dynamic variables--including those
you've used C<local> on--but I<not> lexical variables, which are created
with C<my>.  Typically it would be the first declaration in a file to
be included by the C<require> or C<use> operator.  You can switch into a
package in more than one place; it merely influences which symbol table
is used by the compiler for the rest of that block.  You can refer to
variables and filehandles in other packages by prefixing the identifier
with the package name and a double colon:  C<$Package::Variable>.
If the package name is null, the C<main> package as assumed.  That is,
C<$::sail> is equivalent to C<$main::sail> (as well as to C<$main'sail>,
still seen in older code).

If NAMESPACE is omitted, then there is no current package, and all
identifiers must be fully qualified or lexicals.  However, you are
strongly advised not to make use of this feature. Its use can cause
unexpected behaviour, even crashing some versions of Perl. It is
deprecated, and will be removed from a future release.

See L<perlmod/"Packages"> for more information about packages, modules,
and classes.  See L<perlsub> for other scoping issues.

=item pipe READHANDLE,WRITEHANDLE

Opens a pair of connected pipes like the corresponding system call.
Note that if you set up a loop of piped processes, deadlock can occur
unless you are very careful.  In addition, note that Perl's pipes use
IO buffering, so you may need to set C<$|> to flush your WRITEHANDLE
after each command, depending on the application.

See L<IPC::Open2>, L<IPC::Open3>, and L<perlipc/"Bidirectional Communication">
for examples of such things.

On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set
for the newly opened file descriptors as determined by the value of $^F.
See L<perlvar/$^F>.

=item pop ARRAY

=item pop

Pops and returns the last value of the array, shortening the array by
one element.  Has an effect similar to

    $ARRAY[$#ARRAY--]

If there are no elements in the array, returns the undefined value
(although this may happen at other times as well).  If ARRAY is
omitted, pops the C<@ARGV> array in the main program, and the C<@_>
array in subroutines, just like C<shift>.

=item pos SCALAR

=item pos

Returns the offset of where the last C<m//g> search left off for the variable
in question (C<$_> is used when the variable is not specified).  Note that
0 is a valid match offset, while C<undef> indicates that the search position
is reset (usually due to match failure, but can also be because no match has
yet been performed on the scalar). C<pos> directly accesses the location used
by the regexp engine to store the offset, so assigning to C<pos> will change
that offset, and so will also influence the C<\G> zero-width assertion in
regular expressions. Because a failed C<m//gc> match doesn't reset the offset,
the return from C<pos> won't change either in this case.  See L<perlre> and
L<perlop>.

=item print FILEHANDLE LIST

=item print LIST

=item print

Prints a string or a list of strings.  Returns true if successful.
FILEHANDLE may be a scalar variable name, in which case the variable
contains the name of or a reference to the filehandle, thus introducing
one level of indirection.  (NOTE: If FILEHANDLE is a variable and
the next token is a term, it may be misinterpreted as an operator
unless you interpose a C<+> or put parentheses around the arguments.)
If FILEHANDLE is omitted, prints by default to standard output (or
to the last selected output channel--see L</select>).  If LIST is
also omitted, prints C<$_> to the currently selected output channel.
To set the default output channel to something other than STDOUT
use the select operation.  The current value of C<$,> (if any) is
printed between each LIST item.  The current value of C<$\> (if
any) is printed after the entire LIST has been printed.  Because
print takes a LIST, anything in the LIST is evaluated in list
context, and any subroutine that you call will have one or more of
its expressions evaluated in list context.  Also be careful not to
follow the print keyword with a left parenthesis unless you want
the corresponding right parenthesis to terminate the arguments to
the print--interpose a C<+> or put parentheses around all the
arguments.

Note that if you're storing FILEHANDLES in an array or other expression,
you will have to use a block returning its value instead:

    print { $files[$i] } "stuff\n";
    print { $OK ? STDOUT : STDERR } "stuff\n";

=item printf FILEHANDLE FORMAT, LIST

=item printf FORMAT, LIST

Equivalent to C<print FILEHANDLE sprintf(FORMAT, LIST)>, except that C<$\>
(the output record separator) is not appended.  The first argument
of the list will be interpreted as the C<printf> format. See C<sprintf>
for an explanation of the format argument. If C<use locale> is in effect,
the character used for the decimal point in formatted real numbers is
affected by the LC_NUMERIC locale.  See L<perllocale>.

Don't fall into the trap of using a C<printf> when a simple
C<print> would do.  The C<print> is more efficient and less
error prone.

=item prototype FUNCTION

Returns the prototype of a function as a string (or C<undef> if the
function has no prototype).  FUNCTION is a reference to, or the name of,
the function whose prototype you want to retrieve.

If FUNCTION is a string starting with C<CORE::>, the rest is taken as a
name for Perl builtin.  If the builtin is not I<overridable> (such as
C<qw//>) or its arguments cannot be expressed by a prototype (such as
C<system>) returns C<undef> because the builtin does not really behave
like a Perl function.  Otherwise, the string describing the equivalent
prototype is returned.

=item push ARRAY,LIST

Treats ARRAY as a stack, and pushes the values of LIST
onto the end of ARRAY.  The length of ARRAY increases by the length of
LIST.  Has the same effect as

    for $value (LIST) {
        $ARRAY[++$#ARRAY] = $value;
    }

but is more efficient.  Returns the new number of elements in the array.

=item q/STRING/

=item qq/STRING/

=item qr/STRING/

=item qx/STRING/

=item qw/STRING/

Generalized quotes.  See L<perlop/"Regexp Quote-Like Operators">.

=item quotemeta EXPR

=item quotemeta

Returns the value of EXPR with all non-"word"
characters backslashed.  (That is, all characters not matching
C</[A-Za-z_0-9]/> will be preceded by a backslash in the
returned string, regardless of any locale settings.)
This is the internal function implementing
the C<\Q> escape in double-quoted strings.

If EXPR is omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item rand EXPR

=item rand

Returns a random fractional number greater than or equal to C<0> and less
than the value of EXPR.  (EXPR should be positive.)  If EXPR is
omitted, the value C<1> is used.  Currently EXPR with the value C<0> is
also special-cased as C<1> - this has not been documented before perl 5.8.0
and is subject to change in future versions of perl.  Automatically calls
C<srand> unless C<srand> has already been called.  See also C<srand>.

Apply C<int()> to the value returned by C<rand()> if you want random
integers instead of random fractional numbers.  For example,

    int(rand(10))

returns a random integer between C<0> and C<9>, inclusive.

(Note: If your rand function consistently returns numbers that are too
large or too small, then your version of Perl was probably compiled
with the wrong number of RANDBITS.)

=item read FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET

=item read FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH

Attempts to read LENGTH I<characters> of data into variable SCALAR
from the specified FILEHANDLE.  Returns the number of characters
actually read, C<0> at end of file, or undef if there was an error (in
the latter case C<$!> is also set).  SCALAR will be grown or shrunk 
so that the last character actually read is the last character of the
scalar after the read.

An OFFSET may be specified to place the read data at some place in the
string other than the beginning.  A negative OFFSET specifies
placement at that many characters counting backwards from the end of
the string.  A positive OFFSET greater than the length of SCALAR
results in the string being padded to the required size with C<"\0">
bytes before the result of the read is appended.

The call is actually implemented in terms of either Perl's or system's
fread() call.  To get a true read(2) system call, see C<sysread>.

Note the I<characters>: depending on the status of the filehandle,
either (8-bit) bytes or characters are read.  By default all
filehandles operate on bytes, but for example if the filehandle has
been opened with the C<:utf8> I/O layer (see L</open>, and the C<open>
pragma, L<open>), the I/O will operate on UTF-8 encoded Unicode
characters, not bytes.  Similarly for the C<:encoding> pragma:
in that case pretty much any characters can be read.

=item readdir DIRHANDLE

Returns the next directory entry for a directory opened by C<opendir>.
If used in list context, returns all the rest of the entries in the
directory.  If there are no more entries, returns an undefined value in
scalar context or a null list in list context.

If you're planning to filetest the return values out of a C<readdir>, you'd
better prepend the directory in question.  Otherwise, because we didn't
C<chdir> there, it would have been testing the wrong file.

    opendir(DIR, $some_dir) || die "can't opendir $some_dir: $!";
    @dots = grep { /^\./ && -f "$some_dir/$_" } readdir(DIR);
    closedir DIR;

=item readline EXPR

Reads from the filehandle whose typeglob is contained in EXPR.  In scalar
context, each call reads and returns the next line, until end-of-file is
reached, whereupon the subsequent call returns undef.  In list context,
reads until end-of-file is reached and returns a list of lines.  Note that
the notion of "line" used here is however you may have defined it
with C<$/> or C<$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR>).  See L<perlvar/"$/">.

When C<$/> is set to C<undef>, when readline() is in scalar
context (i.e. file slurp mode), and when an empty file is read, it
returns C<''> the first time, followed by C<undef> subsequently.

This is the internal function implementing the C<< <EXPR> >>
operator, but you can use it directly.  The C<< <EXPR> >>
operator is discussed in more detail in L<perlop/"I/O Operators">.

    $line = <STDIN>;
    $line = readline(*STDIN);           # same thing

If readline encounters an operating system error, C<$!> will be set with the
corresponding error message.  It can be helpful to check C<$!> when you are
reading from filehandles you don't trust, such as a tty or a socket.  The
following example uses the operator form of C<readline>, and takes the necessary
steps to ensure that C<readline> was successful.

    for (;;) {
        undef $!;
        unless (defined( $line = <> )) {
            die $! if $!;
            last; # reached EOF
        }
        # ...
    }

=item readlink EXPR

=item readlink

Returns the value of a symbolic link, if symbolic links are
implemented.  If not, gives a fatal error.  If there is some system
error, returns the undefined value and sets C<$!> (errno).  If EXPR is
omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item readpipe EXPR

EXPR is executed as a system command.
The collected standard output of the command is returned.
In scalar context, it comes back as a single (potentially
multi-line) string.  In list context, returns a list of lines
(however you've defined lines with C<$/> or C<$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR>).
This is the internal function implementing the C<qx/EXPR/>
operator, but you can use it directly.  The C<qx/EXPR/>
operator is discussed in more detail in L<perlop/"I/O Operators">.

=item recv SOCKET,SCALAR,LENGTH,FLAGS

Receives a message on a socket.  Attempts to receive LENGTH characters
of data into variable SCALAR from the specified SOCKET filehandle.
SCALAR will be grown or shrunk to the length actually read.  Takes the
same flags as the system call of the same name.  Returns the address
of the sender if SOCKET's protocol supports this; returns an empty
string otherwise.  If there's an error, returns the undefined value.
This call is actually implemented in terms of recvfrom(2) system call.
See L<perlipc/"UDP: Message Passing"> for examples.

Note the I<characters>: depending on the status of the socket, either
(8-bit) bytes or characters are received.  By default all sockets
operate on bytes, but for example if the socket has been changed using
binmode() to operate with the C<:utf8> I/O layer (see the C<open>
pragma, L<open>), the I/O will operate on UTF-8 encoded Unicode
characters, not bytes.  Similarly for the C<:encoding> pragma:
in that case pretty much any characters can be read.

=item redo LABEL

=item redo

The C<redo> command restarts the loop block without evaluating the
conditional again.  The C<continue> block, if any, is not executed.  If
the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing
loop.  This command is normally used by programs that want to lie to
themselves about what was just input:

    # a simpleminded Pascal comment stripper
    # (warning: assumes no { or } in strings)
    LINE: while (<STDIN>) {
        while (s|({.*}.*){.*}|$1 |) {}
        s|{.*}| |;
        if (s|{.*| |) {
            $front = $_;
            while (<STDIN>) {
                if (/}/) {      # end of comment?
                    s|^|$front\{|;
                    redo LINE;
                }
            }
        }
        print;
    }

C<redo> cannot be used to retry a block which returns a value such as
C<eval {}>, C<sub {}> or C<do {}>, and should not be used to exit
a grep() or map() operation.

Note that a block by itself is semantically identical to a loop
that executes once.  Thus C<redo> inside such a block will effectively
turn it into a looping construct.

See also L</continue> for an illustration of how C<last>, C<next>, and
C<redo> work.

=item ref EXPR

=item ref

Returns a non-empty string if EXPR is a reference, the empty
string otherwise. If EXPR
is not specified, C<$_> will be used.  The value returned depends on the
type of thing the reference is a reference to.
Builtin types include:

    SCALAR
    ARRAY
    HASH
    CODE
    REF
    GLOB
    LVALUE

If the referenced object has been blessed into a package, then that package
name is returned instead.  You can think of C<ref> as a C<typeof> operator.

    if (ref($r) eq "HASH") {
        print "r is a reference to a hash.\n";
    }
    unless (ref($r)) {
        print "r is not a reference at all.\n";
    }
    if (UNIVERSAL::isa($r, "HASH")) {  # for subclassing
        print "r is a reference to something that isa hash.\n";
    }

See also L<perlref>.

=item rename OLDNAME,NEWNAME

Changes the name of a file; an existing file NEWNAME will be
clobbered.  Returns true for success, false otherwise.

Behavior of this function varies wildly depending on your system
implementation.  For example, it will usually not work across file system
boundaries, even though the system I<mv> command sometimes compensates
for this.  Other restrictions include whether it works on directories,
open files, or pre-existing files.  Check L<perlport> and either the
rename(2) manpage or equivalent system documentation for details.

=item require VERSION

=item require EXPR

=item require

Demands a version of Perl specified by VERSION, or demands some semantics
specified by EXPR or by C<$_> if EXPR is not supplied.

VERSION may be either a numeric argument such as 5.006, which will be
compared to C<$]>, or a literal of the form v5.6.1, which will be compared
to C<$^V> (aka $PERL_VERSION).  A fatal error is produced at run time if
VERSION is greater than the version of the current Perl interpreter.
Compare with L</use>, which can do a similar check at compile time.

Specifying VERSION as a literal of the form v5.6.1 should generally be
avoided, because it leads to misleading error messages under earlier
versions of Perl which do not support this syntax.  The equivalent numeric
version should be used instead.

    require v5.6.1;     # run time version check
    require 5.6.1;      # ditto
    require 5.006_001;  # ditto; preferred for backwards compatibility

Otherwise, demands that a library file be included if it hasn't already
been included.  The file is included via the do-FILE mechanism, which is
essentially just a variety of C<eval>.  Has semantics similar to the
following subroutine:

    sub require {
       my ($filename) = @_;
       if (exists $INC{$filename}) {
           return 1 if $INC{$filename};
           die "Compilation failed in require";
       }
       my ($realfilename,$result);
       ITER: {
           foreach $prefix (@INC) {
               $realfilename = "$prefix/$filename";
               if (-f $realfilename) {
                   $INC{$filename} = $realfilename;
                   $result = do $realfilename;
                   last ITER;
               }
           }
           die "Can't find $filename in \@INC";
       }
       if ($@) {
           $INC{$filename} = undef;
           die $@;
       } elsif (!$result) {
           delete $INC{$filename};
           die "$filename did not return true value";
       } else {
           return $result;
       }
    }

Note that the file will not be included twice under the same specified
name.

The file must return true as the last statement to indicate
successful execution of any initialization code, so it's customary to
end such a file with C<1;> unless you're sure it'll return true
otherwise.  But it's better just to put the C<1;>, in case you add more
statements.

If EXPR is a bareword, the require assumes a "F<.pm>" extension and
replaces "F<::>" with "F</>" in the filename for you,
to make it easy to load standard modules.  This form of loading of
modules does not risk altering your namespace.

In other words, if you try this:

        require Foo::Bar;    # a splendid bareword

The require function will actually look for the "F<Foo/Bar.pm>" file in the
directories specified in the C<@INC> array.

But if you try this:

        $class = 'Foo::Bar';
        require $class;      # $class is not a bareword
    #or
        require "Foo::Bar";  # not a bareword because of the ""

The require function will look for the "F<Foo::Bar>" file in the @INC array and
will complain about not finding "F<Foo::Bar>" there.  In this case you can do:

        eval "require $class";

Now that you understand how C<require> looks for files in the case of
a bareword argument, there is a little extra functionality going on
behind the scenes.  Before C<require> looks for a "F<.pm>" extension,
it will first look for a filename with a "F<.pmc>" extension.  A file
with this extension is assumed to be Perl bytecode generated by
L<B::Bytecode|B::Bytecode>.  If this file is found, and its modification
time is newer than a coinciding "F<.pm>" non-compiled file, it will be
loaded in place of that non-compiled file ending in a "F<.pm>" extension.

You can also insert hooks into the import facility, by putting directly
Perl code into the @INC array.  There are three forms of hooks: subroutine
references, array references and blessed objects.

Subroutine references are the simplest case.  When the inclusion system
walks through @INC and encounters a subroutine, this subroutine gets
called with two parameters, the first being a reference to itself, and the
second the name of the file to be included (e.g. "F<Foo/Bar.pm>").  The
subroutine should return C<undef> or a filehandle, from which the file to
include will be read.  If C<undef> is returned, C<require> will look at
the remaining elements of @INC.

If the hook is an array reference, its first element must be a subroutine
reference.  This subroutine is called as above, but the first parameter is
the array reference.  This enables to pass indirectly some arguments to
the subroutine.

In other words, you can write:

    push @INC, \&my_sub;
    sub my_sub {
        my ($coderef, $filename) = @_;  # $coderef is \&my_sub
        ...
    }

or:

    push @INC, [ \&my_sub, $x, $y, ... ];
    sub my_sub {
        my ($arrayref, $filename) = @_;
        # Retrieve $x, $y, ...
        my @parameters = @$arrayref[1..$#$arrayref];
        ...
    }

If the hook is an object, it must provide an INC method, that will be
called as above, the first parameter being the object itself.  (Note that
you must fully qualify the sub's name, as it is always forced into package
C<main>.)  Here is a typical code layout:

    # In Foo.pm
    package Foo;
    sub new { ... }
    sub Foo::INC {
        my ($self, $filename) = @_;
        ...
    }

    # In the main program
    push @INC, new Foo(...);

Note that these hooks are also permitted to set the %INC entry
corresponding to the files they have loaded. See L<perlvar/%INC>.

For a yet-more-powerful import facility, see L</use> and L<perlmod>.

=item reset EXPR

=item reset

Generally used in a C<continue> block at the end of a loop to clear
variables and reset C<??> searches so that they work again.  The
expression is interpreted as a list of single characters (hyphens
allowed for ranges).  All variables and arrays beginning with one of
those letters are reset to their pristine state.  If the expression is
omitted, one-match searches (C<?pattern?>) are reset to match again.  Resets
only variables or searches in the current package.  Always returns
1.  Examples:

    reset 'X';          # reset all X variables
    reset 'a-z';        # reset lower case variables
    reset;              # just reset ?one-time? searches

Resetting C<"A-Z"> is not recommended because you'll wipe out your
C<@ARGV> and C<@INC> arrays and your C<%ENV> hash.  Resets only package
variables--lexical variables are unaffected, but they clean themselves
up on scope exit anyway, so you'll probably want to use them instead.
See L</my>.

=item return EXPR

=item return

Returns from a subroutine, C<eval>, or C<do FILE> with the value
given in EXPR.  Evaluation of EXPR may be in list, scalar, or void
context, depending on how the return value will be used, and the context
may vary from one execution to the next (see C<wantarray>).  If no EXPR
is given, returns an empty list in list context, the undefined value in
scalar context, and (of course) nothing at all in a void context.

(Note that in the absence of an explicit C<return>, a subroutine, eval,
or do FILE will automatically return the value of the last expression
evaluated.)

=item reverse LIST

In list context, returns a list value consisting of the elements
of LIST in the opposite order.  In scalar context, concatenates the
elements of LIST and returns a string value with all characters
in the opposite order.

    print reverse <>;           # line tac, last line first

    undef $/;                   # for efficiency of <>
    print scalar reverse <>;    # character tac, last line tsrif

Used without arguments in scalar context, reverse() reverses C<$_>.

This operator is also handy for inverting a hash, although there are some
caveats.  If a value is duplicated in the original hash, only one of those
can be represented as a key in the inverted hash.  Also, this has to
unwind one hash and build a whole new one, which may take some time
on a large hash, such as from a DBM file.

    %by_name = reverse %by_address;     # Invert the hash

=item rewinddir DIRHANDLE

Sets the current position to the beginning of the directory for the
C<readdir> routine on DIRHANDLE.

=item rindex STR,SUBSTR,POSITION

=item rindex STR,SUBSTR

Works just like index() except that it returns the position of the LAST
occurrence of SUBSTR in STR.  If POSITION is specified, returns the
last occurrence at or before that position.

=item rmdir FILENAME

=item rmdir

Deletes the directory specified by FILENAME if that directory is
empty.  If it succeeds it returns true, otherwise it returns false and
sets C<$!> (errno).  If FILENAME is omitted, uses C<$_>.

=item s///

The substitution operator.  See L<perlop>.

=item scalar EXPR

Forces EXPR to be interpreted in scalar context and returns the value
of EXPR.

    @counts = ( scalar @a, scalar @b, scalar @c );

There is no equivalent operator to force an expression to
be interpolated in list context because in practice, this is never
needed.  If you really wanted to do so, however, you could use
the construction C<@{[ (some expression) ]}>, but usually a simple
C<(some expression)> suffices.

Because C<scalar> is unary operator, if you accidentally use for EXPR a
parenthesized list, this behaves as a scalar comma expression, evaluating
all but the last element in void context and returning the final element
evaluated in scalar context.  This is seldom what you want.

The following single statement:

        print uc(scalar(&foo,$bar)),$baz;

is the moral equivalent of these two:

        &foo;
        print(uc($bar),$baz);

See L<perlop> for more details on unary operators and the comma operator.

=item seek FILEHANDLE,POSITION,WHENCE

Sets FILEHANDLE's position, just like the C<fseek> call of C<stdio>.
FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the
filehandle.  The values for WHENCE are C<0> to set the new position
I<in bytes> to POSITION, C<1> to set it to the current position plus
POSITION, and C<2> to set it to EOF plus POSITION (typically
negative).  For WHENCE you may use the constants C<SEEK_SET>,
C<SEEK_CUR>, and C<SEEK_END> (start of the file, current position, end
of the file) from the Fcntl module.  Returns C<1> upon success, C<0>
otherwise.

Note the I<in bytes>: even if the filehandle has been set to
operate on characters (for example by using the C<:utf8> open
layer), tell() will return byte offsets, not character offsets
(because implementing that would render seek() and tell() rather slow).

If you want to position file for C<sysread> or C<syswrite>, don't use
C<seek>--buffering makes its effect on the file's system position
unpredictable and non-portable.  Use C<sysseek> instead.

Due to the rules and rigors of ANSI C, on some systems you have to do a
seek whenever you switch between reading and writing.  Amongst other
things, this may have the effect of calling stdio's clearerr(3).
A WHENCE of C<1> (C<SEEK_CUR>) is useful for not moving the file position:

    seek(TEST,0,1);

This is also useful for applications emulating C<tail -f>.  Once you hit
EOF on your read, and then sleep for a while, you might have to stick in a
seek() to reset things.  The C<seek> doesn't change the current position,
but it I<does> clear the end-of-file condition on the handle, so that the
next C<< <FILE> >> makes Perl try again to read something.  We hope.

If that doesn't work (some IO implementations are particularly
cantankerous), then you may need something more like this:

    for (;;) {
        for ($curpos = tell(FILE); $_ = <FILE>;
             $curpos = tell(FILE)) {
            # search for some stuff and put it into files
        }
        sleep($for_a_while);
        seek(FILE, $curpos, 0);
    }

=item seekdir DIRHANDLE,POS

Sets the current position for the C<readdir> routine on DIRHANDLE.  POS
must be a value returned by C<telldir>.  Has the same caveats about
possible directory compaction as the corresponding system library
routine.

=item select FILEHANDLE

=item select

Returns the currently selected filehandle.  Sets the current default
filehandle for output, if FILEHANDLE is supplied.  This has two
effects: first, a C<write> or a C<print> without a filehandle will
default to this FILEHANDLE.  Second, references to variables related to
output will refer to this output channel.  For example, if you have to
set the top of form format for more than one output channel, you might
do the following:

    select(REPORT1);
    $^ = 'report1_top';
    select(REPORT2);
    $^ = 'report2_top';

FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the
actual filehandle.  Thus:

    $oldfh = select(STDERR); $| = 1; select($oldfh);

Some programmers may prefer to think of filehandles as objects with
methods, preferring to write the last example as:

    use IO::Handle;
    STDERR->autoflush(1);

=item select RBITS,WBITS,EBITS,TIMEOUT

This calls the select(2) system call with the bit masks specified, which
can be constructed using C<fileno> and C<vec>, along these lines:

    $rin = $win = $ein = '';
    vec($rin,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1;
    vec($win,fileno(STDOUT),1) = 1;
    $ein = $rin | $win;

If you want to select on many filehandles you might wish to write a
subroutine:

    sub fhbits {
        my(@fhlist) = split(' ',$_[0]);
        my($bits);
        for (@fhlist) {
            vec($bits,fileno($_),1) = 1;
        }
        $bits;
    }
    $rin = fhbits('STDIN TTY SOCK');

The usual idiom is:

    ($nfound,$timeleft) =
      select($rout=$rin, $wout=$win, $eout=$ein, $timeout);

or to block until something becomes ready just do this

    $nfound = select($rout=$rin, $wout=$win, $eout=$ein, undef);

Most systems do not bother to return anything useful in $timeleft, so
calling select() in scalar context just returns $nfound.

Any of the bit masks can also be undef.  The timeout, if specified, is
in seconds, which may be fractional.  Note: not all implementations are
capable of returning the $timeleft.  If not, they always return
$timeleft equal to the supplied $timeout.

You can effect a sleep of 250 milliseconds this way: