What's good practice for Perl special variables?

Question

First off, does anyone have a comprehensive list of the Perl special variables?

Second, are there any tasks that are much easier using them? I always unset $/ to read in files all at once, and $| to automatically flush buffers, but I'm not sure of any others.

And third, should one use the Perl special variables, or be more explicit in their coding. Personally I'm a fan of using the special variables to manipulate the way code behaves, but I've heard others argue that it just confuses things.

Answer 1

They are all documented in perlvar.

Note that the long names are only usable if you use English qw( -no_match_vars ); first.