On Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:32:15 +0900, you wrote:

>>     print $trimmed $_ if $diff[0] < $ARGV[1] && defined(@diff);

>Here you check that @diff is defined after trying to access an element 
>of diff, is that right?

that  perl code means a line read from the log file is written to an
archive file IF the date matches the criteria AND that @diff exists

>     print $trimmed $_ if diff &&  diff[0] < ARGV[1] 

except that in this case @diff may contain a '1'  or other garbage. to
avoid that, it's undefined and only defined when it's assigned valid
data.

before i settled on that particular line of code, i tried other
things...that was the shortest that worked...