[gentoo-dev] perl question

[Chad M. Huneycutt]

Can anyone explain to me why this I can't see $dir inside the unless 
block in the code fragment below?

sub recurse {
   my $dir = shift;

   print "dir: $dir\n";
   unless ( defined($exceptions{$dir}) ) {
      print "$dir is not an exception
   }
}

basically, dir is correct in the first print statement, and then gone 
inside the unless block (even if I do a "unless (0)", the second print 
shows $dir as undefined).

I basically want to make sure that the problem is not that I am unaware 
of some scoping rule of perl. I believe that this code is just acting 
unexpectedly, but I want to make sure before I spend any more time 
debugging it.  And yes, this is a gentoo-related program.

Thanks,
   Chad