About 'the question you asked' in the second snippet: you got out a number, repeated 5 times, right?

This is because you wrote $line=@record, which means: assign to $line the number of elements in the array @record.

This happens because assigning to a scalar variables sets scalar context for the right-hand side of the assignment, and an array in scalar context evaluates to its lenght.

-- 
        dakkar - Mobilis in mobile