Just an attempt to explain the reference magic showed to you by procura.
This is probably the way the Perlians do it but very scaring to Perl newbies.
Especially they should read the POD because it's all explained therein.
Here's an excerpt from "perldoc perlref"
Here's a trick for interpolating a subroutine call into a string:
print "My sub returned @{[mysub(1,2,3)]} that time.\n";
The way it works is that when the "@{...}" is seen in the double-
quoted string, it's evaluated as a block. The block creates a
reference to an anonymous array containing the results of the call to
"mysub(1,2,3)". So the whole block returns a reference to an array,
which is then dereferenced by "@{...}" and stuck into the double-
quoted string. This chicanery is also useful for arbitrary
expressions:
print "That yields @{[$n + 5]} widgets\n";
Just a word of caution.
Yes, procura is right you can ommit the parentheses of function if they were predeclared (either built-in, or by the "subs" pragma).
And this you will see in code of frequent Perl hackers.
But this can be very tricky, and you can easily fall victim to precedence.
E.g. if you don't distinguish between the "or" and "||" operator this may lead to strange results when you omitted parentheses.
Precedence itself can get very tricky especially when using convoluted compound statements.
See "perldoc perlop"
Moral, when in doubt, be boring and explicit.
Madness, thy name is system administration
