Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Shift Operators

The bit-shift operators (<< and >>) return the value of the left argument shifted to the left (<<) or to the right (>>) by the number of bits specified by the right argument. The arguments should be integers. For example:

1 << 4;     # returns 16
32 >> 4;    # returns 2

Be careful, though. Results on large (or negative) numbers may vary depending on the number of bits your machine uses to represent integers. You can avoid this restriction with the bigint pragma.

use v5.14;
say 500 <<  20; # prints 524288000
say 500 << 200; # prints (only) 128000

use bigint;
say 500 << 200;
803469022129495137770981046170581301261101496891396417650688000