Think of an array as an apartment building. You may empty a single floor (set the value of the array-element to zero or the empty string) or even erase all traces of its former occupants (set the value of the aray element to undef), but you cannot take the floor itself away. That would really confuse all tenants living above it! When they arrive home in the evening, they would find their apartment having dropped one level. If you have a fifth floor in your building, you must have all the lower numbered floors (zero to four) as well.

In other words, as long as there are still array elements with an higher index, you cannot delete the lower numbered ones without fundamentally changing the structure of the array itself.

PS: Of course functions like pop, push, shift, unshift do change the structure of the array, but only from the top or bottom end.

Thanks for your reply I am confused as it is working in Linux but not in the Solaris...

Which versions of Perl are you using on those two machines?

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

delete works on is intended for a hash, not an array.

If you just want to filter out certain elements of an array, use grep or splice:

my $file = "test_html";
my @file_lkp = ("file1", "file2");

@file_lkp = grep {$_ ne $file} @file_lkp;
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delete works on a hash, not an array.

Hm. It does 'work' on an array on both 5.8.9 and 5.10.1:

C:\test>\perl32\bin\perl -Mstrict -we"my @a = 1..10; delete $a[5]; pri
+nt qq[@a]"
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at -e line 1.
1 2 3 4 5  7 8 9 10

C:\test>\perl64\bin\perl -Mstrict -we"my @a = 1..10; delete $a[5]; pri
+nt qq[@a]"
Use of uninitialized value in join or string at -e line 1.
1 2 3 4 5  7 8 9 10
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It doesn't really do what you'd hope it would do in as much as it leaves behind an undef in place of the deleted element, but there are no warnings or deprecations.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

From the Perl 5.12 perlfunc documentation for delete:

delete() may also be used on arrays and array slices, but its behavior is less straightforward. Although exists() will return false for deleted entries, deleting array elements never changes indices of existing values; use shift() or splice() for that. However, if all deleted elements fall at the end of an array, the array's size shrinks to the position of the highest element that still tests true for exists(), or to 0 if none do.

Be aware that calling delete on array values is deprecated and likely to be removed in a future version of Perl.

Possibly your Solaris system has "a future version of Perl".

Typically I would say you probably want splice or the other array functions others have mentioned pop, shift because these all and remove array elements and shrink the array and that is a much more often used functionality, at least from my experience.

Looking at your code you probably want this, no?

my $file="test_html";
my @file_lkp=("file1","file2");
for (my $i=0;$i<=$#file_lkp;$i++) {
   splice(@file_lkp, $i, 1) if $file eq $file_lkp[$i];
}
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