To do it your way you would just write @ARGV = qw/file1 file2 file3/; but you can just provide these filenames from the command line, so if your perl script is called do_it then you call it with perl do_it file1 file2then $ARGV[0] in your program would contain file1 and $ARGV[1] would be file2.

You can specify the backup copy also from the command line with perl -i.bk do_it foo.barinstead of using $^I = '.bk';

-- Hofmator

That's helpful, thanks -
I have a lot of files, though; is there a way to automatically do it to all .bar files?

yes, just use the filename expansion of your shell, i.e. perl -i.bk do_it *.bar and all files in the current directory ending in .bar are processed by the script in place (the backups have the additional ending .bk)

-- Hofmator

opendir DIR, "dirname";
@files = readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

for $file (@files) {
  do whatever you want ...
}
[download]

for $file (@files) {
  next if $file =~ /^.+/;
}
[download]

for $file (@files) {
  next if $file !~ /\.whatever/;
  do your stuff here
}
[download]

-----------------------------------
--the good, the bad and the physi--
-----------------------------------
[download]

#!/jpsama/bin/perl -w
$tks = `mount`;
$jpsama = $! if $!;
print $jpsama;