SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

More Operators

Perl has so many operators that there isn't enough space in this book to document them all fully. (You can read about most of them in the “perlop” manual page.) But for the remainder of this hour, you'll read about the most commonly used operators and functions in Perl.

One-Operand (Unary) Operators

Until now, all the operators you've read about take two operands—that is, two expressions, from whose values the operators make a new value in some way. For example, 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, called a unary operator, takes only one operand. You're probably familiar with one example of these already—the ...