Also note that, because of the distinction between truthiness and definedness mentioned in previous replies, you're going to want to use //= instead of ||= in the vast majority of cases unless your code needs to support pre-5.10 versions of Perl.

If you are "deep enough in the Perl culture" to know to google "orcish maneuver", you probably don't need to look it up. On the other hand, if all you know to google is "||=", you're screwed unless you think to try "double pipe equals".

Teach a man how to find answers and you teach him for life.
Answer his questions for him and you get Perlmonks XP.

You got me, the only reason I'm on here is to accumulate XP so I can get more spells and a larger HP pool next level.

Seriously though, I think the OP did a decent job trying to figure things out before posting. S/he read the obvious doc, did some troubleshooting, and had a nearly correct understanding of the ||= operator, but was unsure and needed confirmation and a little guidance. I think the OP's main issue is that the reader of perlop needs to extrapolate some of the function of ||= from the examples for += and the OP may have missed that. Regarding // vs ||, even some of the people answering had some confusion.

OK, that's my two cents. Now I'm off to Reddit, where the votes actually matter!

To be fair, some things are a pain in the ass to google properly (especially if you aren't familiar with the topic in the first place). Also, documentation always makes more sense when you already know the topic. :P

That is not what I'm talking about since the OP was able to find perlop, but the problem was, it merely listed ||= it didn't explain much about it.

You had to read large chunks of perlop to figure out ||= is two operators in one, assignment and logical-or, and even then it didn't explain truthiness

On truthiness

• What is the correct definition of False and Null in Perl?
• Validation: is defined whether the variable?
• True or False? A Quick Reference Guide
• What is truth? (Curiosity corner)
• When does while() test for defined vs truth

How ||= works , its FAQ even though it doesn't search that way :)

2012-07-09	live4tech	||= (poorly documented?)	SoPW
2010-10-24	perl-diddler	is ||= threadsafe?	SoPW
2009-04-07	Anonymous Monk	What is the difference between |= and ||=?	SoPW
2009-01-06	Brovnik	||= in Hash Slice	SoPW
2008-09-19	Anonymous Monk	What the heck does "tests->{$stype} ||= {};" do?	SoPW
2008-05-28	throop	||= oddity	SoPW
2007-11-27	Anonymous Monk	Or, Or, Equals Zero, $x ||= 0	SoPW
2007-03-02	saintmike	Why are "a ||= b" and "a = a || b" different?	SoPW
2006-01-12	demerphq	Are "$hash{$_} ||= 1 + keys %hash" and variants well defined or not?	Med