Let's say you have an array of fruit, like this.

my @fruits = qw(apple banana orange grape peach plum pineapple mango);

Each item in the array will have a unique index number, like this.

• 0 = apple
• 1 = banana
• 2 = orange
• 3 = grape
• 4 = peach
• 5 = plum
• 6 = pineapple
• 7 = mango

By default, a foreach loop will loop through every item in the array, like this.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @fruits = qw(apple banana orange grape peach plum pineapple mango);

foreach my $fruit (@fruits) {
    print "$fruit ";
}

Which will produce the following.

apple banana orange grape peach plum pineapple mango

The List::Util module can be used to loop over a range of items in the array. Let's say you want to loop over items 0 through 3. You would do the following.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use List::Util qw(min);

my @fruits = qw(apple banana orange grape peach plum pineapple mango);

foreach my $fruit (@fruits[0..min(3,$#fruits)]) {
    print "$fruit ";
}

Which will produce the following.

apple banana orange grape