Ok. I was thinking in a more complex direction.

If you have an enumerated list (no wildcards)on the command line, then you need to read multiple things from the command line.

Assign an array, @names = @ARGV instead of scalar like $names. iterate over the @names.

please when you update code, do not delete the original post. This just confuses folks.

update: oh I see that I'm wrong here. I'm doing this on a very small screen and I didn't see it. Oops.