Hello joaming,

To get the syntax right, you’ll need to study perlop#I/O Operators:

The null filehandle <> is special: it can be used to emulate the behavior of sed and awk, .... Input from <> comes either from standard input, or from each file listed on the command line. Here's how it works: the first time <> is evaluated, the @ARGV array is checked, and if it is empty, $ARGV[0] is set to "-", which when opened gives you standard input....

By trial and error, I found the following (on Windows), which seems to do what you’re looking for:

14:17 >echo Hello| perl -wE "$x = <>; chomp $x; $y = $ARGV[0]; say qq[
+>$x $y<];" - world
>Hello world<

14:17 >
[download]

The call to <> finds - as the first argument on the command line and so reads from standard input, which is Hello\n. After this, @ARGV is apparently reset. I haven’t found that behaviour documented (yet).

Anyway, hope that helps,