I second this advice, and (missingthepoint posting anonymously), ++ to you both for helpful replies (when I remember what I changed my password to).

Also, may I suggest you use strict and use warnings? (put those two lines at the top of your code). It will save you a lot of time - I speak from painful experience :|

One final word: it appears as though you're trying to get the number of elements in @a by writing @a +1 -1. That's contorted - you can just say $i <= @a, since <= puts its operands (that is, $i and @a) in scalar context, and for the array, produces the number of elements it contains.

You can improve that even further, too. As it stands you have an off-by-one error - looping from $i = 0 to $i = @array<c> will put you one element beyond the end. If you need a C-style for loop, you can write: <c>for ($i = 0; $i < @a; $i++) { ... and be done with it. :)

But in your situation, you would be better served just doing what dsheroh++ said and using a plain for: for my $element (@a) { <do something with element> ...

Don't hesitate to let me know if that was unclear. :)