Perl Cookbook

Saving Global Values

Problem

You need to temporarily save away the value of a global variable.

Solution

Use the local operator to save a previous global value, automatically restoring it when the current block exits:

$age = 18;          # global variable
if (CONDITION) {
    local $age = 23;
    func();         # sees temporary value of 23
} # restore old value at block exit

Discussion

Unfortunately, Perl’s local operator does not create a local variable. That’s what my does. Instead, local merely preserves an existing value for the duration of its enclosing block. Hindsight shows that if local had been called save_value instead, much confusion could have been avoided.

Still, there are three places where you must use local instead of my:

1. You need to give a global variable a temporary value, especially $_.

2. You need to create a local file or directory handle or a local function.

3. You want to temporarily change just one element of an array or hash.

Using local() for temporary values for globals

The first situation is more apt to happen with predefined, built-in variables than it is with user variables. These are often variables that Perl will use as hints for its high-level operations. In particular, any function that uses $_, implicitly or explicitly, should certainly have a local $_. This is annoyingly easy to forget to do. See Section 13.15 for one solution to this.

Here’s an example of using a lot of global variables. The $/ variable is a global that implicitly affects the behavior of the readline operator used ...