Current line number for the last filehandle accessed.
Each filehandle in Perl counts the number of lines that have been read from it. (Depending on the value of$/, Perl's idea of what constitutes a line may not match yours.) When a line is read from a filehandle (viareadline() or<>), or whentell() orseek() is called on it,$. becomes an alias to the line counter for that filehandle.
You can adjust the counter by assigning to$., but this will not actually move the seek pointer.Localizing$. will not localize the filehandle's line count. Instead, it will localize perl's notion of which filehandle$. is currently aliased to.
$. is reset when the filehandle is closed, butnot when an open filehandle is reopened without an interveningclose(). For more details, see"I/O Operators" in perlop. Because<> never does an explicit close, line numbers increase acrossARGV files (but see examples in"eof" in perlfunc).
You can also useHANDLE->input_line_number(EXPR) to access the line counter for a given filehandle without having to worry about which handle you last accessed.
Mnemonic: many programs use "." to mean the current line number.
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