man > perltrap(1)

PERLTRAP(1)                       Perl Programmers Reference Guide                       PERLTRAP(1)

NAME
       perltrap - Perl traps for the unwary

DESCRIPTION
       The biggest trap of all is forgetting to "use warnings" or use the -w switch; see warnings
       and "-w" in perlrun. The second biggest trap is not making your entire program runnable under
       "use strict".  The third biggest trap is not reading the list of changes in this version of
       Perl; see perldelta.

   Awk Traps
       Accustomed awk users should take special note of the following:

       •   A  Perl program executes only once, not once for each input line.  You can do an implicit
           loop with "-n" or "-p".

       •   The English module, loaded via

               use English;

           allows you to refer to special variables (like $/) with names (like $RS), as though  they
           were in awk; see perlvar for details.

       •   Semicolons  are  required  after  all  simple  statements in Perl (except at the end of a
           block).  Newline is not a statement delimiter.

       •   Curly brackets are required on "if"s and "while"s.

       •   Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.

       •   Arrays index from 0.  Likewise string positions in substr() and index().

       •   You have to decide whether your array has numeric or string indices.

       •   Hash values do not spring into existence upon mere reference.

       •   You have to decide whether you want to use string or numeric comparisons.

       •   Reading an input line does not split it for you.   You  get  to  split  it  to  an  array
           yourself.  And the split() operator has different arguments than awk's.

       •   The current input line is normally in $_, not $0.  It generally does not have the newline
           stripped.  ($0 is the name of the program executed.)  See perlvar.

       •   $<digit>  does  not  refer  to  fields--it refers to substrings matched by the last match
           pattern.

       •   The print() statement does not add field and record separators  unless  you  set  $,  and
           "$\".  You can set $OFS and $ORS if you're using the English module.

       •   You must open your files before you print to them.

       •   The range operator is "..", not comma.  The comma operator works as in C.

       •   The match operator is "=~", not "~".  ("~" is the one's complement operator, as in C.)

       •   The  exponentiation  operator  is "**", not "^".  "^" is the XOR operator, as in C.  (You
           know, one could get the feeling that awk is basically incompatible with C.)

       •   The concatenation operator is ".", not the null string.  (Using  the  null  string  would
           render  "/pat/  /pat/"  unparsable,  because  the  third  slash would be interpreted as a
           division operator--the tokenizer is in fact slightly context sensitive for operators like
           "/", "?", and ">".  And in fact, "." itself can be the beginning of a number.)

       •   The "next", "exit", and "continue" keywords work differently.

       •   The following variables work differently:

                 Awk       Perl
                 ARGC      scalar @ARGV (compare with $#ARGV)
                 ARGV[0]   $0
                 FILENAME  $ARGV
                 FNR       $. - something
                 FS        (whatever you like)
                 NF        $#Fld, or some such
                 NR        $.
                 OFMT      $#
                 OFS       $,
                 ORS       $\
                 RLENGTH   length($&)
                 RS        $/
                 RSTART    length($`)
                 SUBSEP    $;

       •   You cannot set $RS to a pattern, only a string.

       •   When in doubt, run the awk construct through a2p and see what it gives you.

   C/C++ Traps
       Cerebral C and C++ programmers should take note of the following:

       •   Curly brackets are required on "if"'s and "while"'s.

       •   You must use "elsif" rather than "else if".

       •   The  "break"  and  "continue"  keywords  from  C  become  in  Perl  "last"  and   "next",
           respectively.   Unlike  in  C,  these do not work within a "do { } while" construct.  See
           "Loop Control" in perlsyn.

       •   The switch statement is called "given"/"when" and only available in perl 5.10  or  newer.
           See "Switch Statements" in perlsyn.

       •   Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.

       •   Comments begin with "#", not "/*" or "//".  Perl may interpret C/C++ comments as division
           operators, unterminated regular expressions or the defined-or operator.

       •   You  can't  take  the  address  of  anything,  although a similar operator in Perl is the
           backslash, which creates a reference.

       •   "ARGV" must be capitalized.  $ARGV[0] is C's "argv[1]", and "argv[0]" ends up in $0.

       •   System calls such as link(), unlink(), rename(), etc. return nonzero for success, not  0.
           (system(), however, returns zero for success.)

       •   Signal  handlers  deal with signal names, not numbers.  Use "kill -l" to find their names
           on your system.

   JavaScript Traps
       Judicious JavaScript programmers should take note of the following:

       •   In Perl, binary "+" is always addition.  "$string1 + $string2" converts both  strings  to
           numbers and then adds them.  To concatenate two strings, use the "." operator.

       •   The  "+"  unary  operator  doesn't  do  anything  in  Perl.  It exists to avoid syntactic
           ambiguities.

       •   Unlike "for...in", Perl's "for" (also spelled "foreach") does  not  allow  the  left-hand
           side to be an arbitrary expression.  It must be a variable:

              for my $variable (keys %hash) {
                   ...
              }

           Furthermore,  don't  forget  the "keys" in there, as "foreach my $kv (%hash) {}" iterates
           over the keys and values, and is generally not useful ($kv would be a key, then a  value,
           and so on).

       •   To iterate over the indices of an array, use "foreach my $i (0 .. $#array) {}".  "foreach
           my $v (@array) {}" iterates over the values.

       •   Perl requires braces following "if", "while", "foreach", etc.

       •   In Perl, "else if" is spelled "elsif".

       •   "? :" has higher precedence than assignment.  In JavaScript, one can write:

               condition ? do_something() : variable = 3

           and  the  variable  is  only  assigned  if  the  condition  is  false.  In Perl, you need
           parentheses:

               $condition ? do_something() : ($variable = 3);

           Or just use "if".

       •   Perl requires semicolons to separate statements.

       •   Variables declared with "my" only affect code after the declaration.   You  cannot  write
           "$x  =  1;  my $x;" and expect the first assignment to affect the same variable.  It will
           instead assign to an $x declared previously in an outer scope, or to a global variable.

           Note also that the variable is not visible until the  following  statement.   This  means
           that in "my $x = 1 + $x" the second $x refers to one declared previously.

       •   "my"  variables  are  scoped  to  the current block, not to the current function.  If you
           write "{my $x;} $x;", the second $x does not refer to the one declared inside the block.

       •   An object's members cannot be made accessible as variables.  The closest Perl  equivalent
           to "with(object) { method() }" is "for", which can alias $_ to the object:

               for ($object) {
                   $_->method;
               }

       •   The  object  or  class  on  which  a  method  is  called is passed as one of the method's
           arguments, not as a separate "this" value.

   Sed Traps
       Seasoned sed programmers should take note of the following:

       •   A Perl program executes only once, not once for each input line.  You can do an  implicit
           loop with "-n" or "-p".

       •   Backreferences in substitutions use "$" rather than "\".

       •   The pattern matching metacharacters "(", ")", and "|" do not have backslashes in front.

       •   The range operator is "...", rather than comma.

   Shell Traps
       Sharp shell programmers should take note of the following:

       •   The  backtick  operator  does  variable  interpolation  without regard to the presence of
           single quotes in the command.

       •   The backtick operator does no translation of the return value, unlike csh.

       •   Shells (especially csh) do several levels of substitution on  each  command  line.   Perl
           does  substitution  in  only  certain  constructs such as double quotes, backticks, angle
           brackets, and search patterns.

       •   Shells interpret scripts a little bit at a time.  Perl compiles the entire program before
           executing it (except for "BEGIN" blocks, which execute at compile time).

       •   The arguments are available via @ARGV, not $1, $2, etc.

       •   The environment is not automatically made available as separate scalar variables.

       •   The shell's "test" uses "=", "!=", "<" etc for string comparisons and "-eq", "-ne", "-lt"
           etc for numeric comparisons. This is the reverse of Perl, which uses "eq", "ne", "lt" for
           string comparisons, and "==", "!=" "<" etc for numeric comparisons.

   Perl Traps
       Practicing Perl Programmers should take note of the following:

       •   Remember that many operations behave differently in a list context  than  they  do  in  a
           scalar one.  See perldata for details.

       •   Avoid  barewords  if  you  can,  especially  all  lowercase ones.  You can't tell by just
           looking at it whether a bareword is a function or a string.  By using quotes  on  strings
           and parentheses on function calls, you won't ever get them confused.

       •   You  cannot  discern from mere inspection which builtins are unary operators (like chop()
           and chdir())  and  which  are  list  operators  (like  print()  and  unlink()).   (Unless
           prototyped,  user-defined subroutines can only be list operators, never unary ones.)  See
           perlop and perlsub.

       •   People have a hard time remembering that some functions  default  to  $_,  or  @ARGV,  or
           whatever, but that others which you might expect to do not.

       •   The  <FH> construct is not the name of the filehandle, it is a readline operation on that
           handle.  The data read is assigned to $_ only if the file read is the sole condition in a
           while loop:

               while (<FH>)      { }
               while (defined($_ = <FH>)) { }..
               <FH>;  # data discarded!

       •   Remember not to use "=" when you need "=~"; these two constructs are quite different:

               $x =  /foo/;
               $x =~ /foo/;

       •   The "do {}" construct isn't a real loop that you can use loop control on.

       •   Use my() for local variables whenever you can get away with  it  (but  see  perlform  for
           where you can't).  Using local() actually gives a local value to a global variable, which
           leaves you open to unforeseen side-effects of dynamic scoping.

       •   If  you  localize  an  exported variable in a module, its exported value will not change.
           The local name becomes an alias to a new value but the external name is  still  an  alias
           for the original.

       As  always,  if  any  of  these  are  ever  officially declared as bugs, they'll be fixed and
       removed.

perl v5.38.2                                 2026-06-12                                  PERLTRAP(1)