Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

More Operators

Perl has so many operators that I don't have enough space in this book to fully document them all. But for the remainder of this hour, you'll read about the most commonly used operators and functions in Perl.

1-Argument Operators

Until now, all the operators you've read about take two arguments. Division (6/3) requires a dividend (6) and a divisor (3), multiplication (5*2) requires a multiplicand (5) and a multiplier (2), and so on. Another kind of operator takes only one argument. You're probably familiar with one example of these already—the unary minus (-). The unary minus returns the value of its argument negated as a negative number:

6;      # Six
−6;     # Negative six.
−(−5);  # Positive five, not negative five.

Many of Perl's operators ...