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7.18 C-style Logical Defined-Or

Although it has no direct equivalent in C, Perl's // operator is related to its C-style or. In fact, it's exactly the same as ||, except that it tests the left hand side's definedness instead of its truth. Thus, $a // $b is similar to defined($a) || $b (except that it returns the value of $a rather than the value of defined($a)) and is exactly equivalent to defined($a) ? $a : $b. This is very useful for providing default values for variables. If you actually want to test if at least one of $a and $b is defined, use defined($a // $b).

The ||, // and && operators return the last value evaluated (unlike C's || and &&, which return 0 or 1). Thus, a reasonably portable way to find out the home directory might be:

$home = $ENV{'HOME'} // $ENV{'LOGDIR'} //
    (getpwuid($<))[7] // die "You're homeless!\n";

In particular, this means that you shouldn't use this for selecting between two aggregates for assignment:

@a = @b || @c;              # this is wrong
@a = scalar(@b) || @c;      # really meant this
@a = @b ? @b : @c;          # this works fine, though

As more readable alternatives to && and || when used for control flow, Perl provides the and and or operators (see below). The short-circuit behavior is identical. The precedence of "and" and "or" is much lower, however, so that you can safely use them after a list operator without the need for parentheses:

unlink "alpha", "beta", "gamma"
        or gripe(), next LINE;

With the C-style operators that would have been written like this:

unlink("alpha", "beta", "gamma")
        || (gripe(), next LINE);

Using "or" for assignment is unlikely to do what you want; see below.