Re: missing something obvious

[Stephen P. Potter]

Lightning flashed, thunder crashed and "Sean O'Leary" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> whisp
ered:
| split (/./, $ARGV[0], 5)
| 
| I don't know what the 5 is doing there ( I think it should be a 4, because 
| you are assigning the result of the split to 4 a list of variables, but the 
| compiler knows about many things that I don't.)  but you can see what 

The compiler knows about this line of the docs that you missed:

    When assigning to a list, if LIMIT is omitted, Perl supplies a 
    LIMIT one larger than the number of variables in the list, to avoid 
    unnecessary work.

-spp