File Open Question

IPstacks has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Okay... I've been a perl monk for all of a few hours. I have been reading the O'Reilly press book and have made some progress. My basic question is I am trying to open a file and read in the contents and then close the file (haven't even tried to print it yet). The problem is that I get this error:

root@ns1 /root# ./script.pl
Global symbol "@data" requires explicit package name at ./script.pl line 7.
Execution of ./script.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $filename = "/root/estimates.foo.com"; # declare filename

open FILE, $filename or die "Can't open file: $!/n";
@data=<FILE>;
close FILE;
[download]

From everything that I've read, this looks fine. Any help would be appreciated!

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Re: File Open Question by perigeeV (Hermit) on Nov 14, 2001 at 07:51 UTC
root@ns1 /root# ./script.pl Please don't play with Perl while running as root. Please. And on a nameserver no less.	[reply]
Re: File Open Question by jerrygarciuh (Curate) on Nov 14, 2001 at 06:18 UTC
You need to declare all varibles with my when using the `strict` pragma. So declare @data as `my @data` HTH jg _____________________________________________________ My name is Inigo Montoya...	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: File Open Question by Anonymous Monk on Nov 14, 2001 at 06:14 UTC
i doubt this is the problem.. but you should declare the variable.	[reply]
Re: Re: File Open Question by IPstacks (Novice) on Nov 14, 2001 at 06:18 UTC
Oh, declare the @data -- I did that and it's good now. Thanks and sorry about the post.	[reply]
Re: File Open Question by grinder (Bishop) on Nov 14, 2001 at 14:18 UTC
Note that the idiom of slurping an entire file into an array is a bad habit to get into. It's easy to do, but one day you will slurp a really big file by accident, exhaust all your RAM, start to swap, and bring your system to its knees. A much better way to go about reading files is as follows: `open FILE, $filename or die "$0: cannot open $filename for input: $!\n +"; # two notes # 1. Put as much information as possible in the die string # as you can lay your hands on. # 2. That's \n, not /n, but I guess you realised that already... while( <FILE> ) { # possibly... chomp; # otherwise do what you want with $_ } close FILE;` [download] Creating scripts with small memory footprints is a good idea. Otherwise the other people using the system will start to equate Perl with prolifligate memory consumption, and we don't want Perl to get a bad name, right? -- `g r i n d e r`	[reply] [d/l]


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