Generally used in a continue block at the end of a loop to clear variables and reset ?? searches so that they work again. The expression is interpreted as a list of single characters (hyphens allowed for ranges). All variables and arrays beginning with one of those letters are reset to their pristine state. If the expression is omitted, one-match searches (?pattern? ) are reset to match again. Resets only variables or searches in the current package. Always returns 1. Examples:

    reset 'X';		# reset all X variables
    reset 'a-z';	# reset lower case variables
    reset;		# just reset ?one-time? searches

Resetting "A-Z" is not recommended because you'll wipe out your @ARGV and @INC arrays and your %ENV hash. Resets only package variables--lexical variables are unaffected, but they clean themselves up on scope exit anyway, so you'll probably want to use them instead. See "my".