NAME

do - turn a BLOCK into a TERM

SYNOPSIS

do BLOCK

do SUBROUTINE(LIST)

do EXPR

DESCRIPTION

Not really a function. Returns the value of the last command in the sequence of commands indicated by BLOCK. When modified by a loop modifier, executes the BLOCK once before testing the loop condition. (On other statements the loop modifiers test the conditional first.)

A deprecated form of subroutine call. See the perlsub manpage.

Uses the value of EXPR as a filename and executes the contents of the file as a Perl script. Its primary use is to include subroutines from a Perl subroutine library.

    do 'stat.pl';

is just like

    scalar eval `cat stat.pl`;

except that it's more efficient, more concise, keeps track of the current filename for error messages, and searches all the -I libraries if the file isn't in the current directory (see also the @INC array in Predefined Names). It's the same, however, in that it does reparse the file every time you call it, so you probably don't want to do this inside a loop.

Note that inclusion of library modules is better done with the use() and require() operators, which also do error checking and raise an exception if there's a problem.