Hello, and welcome to the wonderful world of perl!
There's a few ways to do this, here's two.
You can scan through the values in @ARGV, one of perl's special variables. It contains all of the arguments following the script's name. From the description you give, this is probably good enough.
There's also the module Getopt::Std. If you want to expand on the meaning and kinds of options, like script.pl -c "Foo.txt" :e -o=n, getopt is your man.

Since you're teaching yourself, here's some basic ideas :
Anything within 'core perl' is available in the core documentation. If you think you haven't found it, look again. :)
Anything not in the core distribution can usually be found in CPAN. Almost any kind of module can be found here; quality varies occasionally, but most are very strong.
Within the monastery, you can often pull up more detailed searches with super search than with search alone.
Also, check out outside links to see what we enjoy and endorse.
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