Thanks everyone for your help, I found the problem was with (1) my
understanding of how Perl functions act on variables in general and (2) with
how chop in
particular behaved.
My subroutine originally contained this:
sub xyz {
$x = chop $_[0];
... do stuff with $x
}
which demonstrates both my misperceptions.
(1) I was thinking that Perl functions were pass by value, i.e. I thought
$_[0] would not be altered. In other words, I was thinking object-orientedly
or
more precisely, I was using Java's String class and it's methods to understand
how Perl operated on scalars. In Java, Strings are immutable and any method
that alters the content of a String actually returns a new String object
composed of the alterations on the original, which remains intact.
(2) I thought chop returned $_[0] minus the last char, when in fact it only
returned the last char.
Anyways, this how my subroutine now looks:
sub xyz {
$x = $_[0];
chop $x;
... do stuff with $x
}
thanks again,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
P.S.
It was chop and not chomp that I need, I'm removing the last "/" on a
directory path, not newlines
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