in reply to need a clearer understanding
I suspect that your failure to put the code in your question in a code block is the reason people are finding you hard to answer.
If my guess is correct it means exactly the same as the same code in the while ($line = <$IFH>){ line that surrounds the read.if($tmp[0] eq ">") { my $nm = substr($line,1); $nm = $nm . $tot; $tot++; $line = <$IFH>; #IS THIS THE LINE YOU MEANT ? chomp $line; $ret{$nm} = $line; }
It reads the next line into the $line variable (If not end of file) within a block which is only run if the previous line began with a ">" character.
print "Good ",qw(night morning afternoon evening)[(localtime)[2]/6]," fellow monks."
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