Perl has many (well, many many) special variables: they are described in the perlvar man page. Specifically arguments passed in the command line are inserted into the special array @ARGV so that the first argument passed to your program will be $ARGV[0] .

This is the basic. In addition you have (already installed) two core modules to handle argument passed via command line: Getopt::Std and Getopt::Long

Then for the processing of the XML inside the file i suggest to use XML::Twig (anyway do NOT use XML::Simple !). The module has a dedicated website full of examples and tutorials.

Use Super Search here at the monastery to spot other valid examples about XML parsing.

I have some usefull links on my homenode about XML.

L*

package My::XML;

sub parse_xml {
    my ($filename) = @_;
    ...
}
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and call

use My::XML;
my $filename = $ARGV[0];
my $data = parse_xml($filename);
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($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
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This is a somewhat confusing question. the first argument to a perl script is in $ARGV[0]. so you can do this.

use strict; use warnings; 
die 'I need an argument' unless ($ARGV[0]); 

#
# capture name of file 
# 
my $name_of_file=$ARGV[0]; 

#
# call a subroutine with the name of file 
#   And capture the data it returns 
# 

my $data=do_something_else ($name_of_file); 
exit; 

sub do_something_else {
  my $filename=shift;  
  print 'Name of file:'.$filename."\n"; 
#
# read all of file at once into single variable 
# 

  my $file_contents; 
  { 
    local $/=undef;
    open (my $infile,'<',$filename) or die 'cannot open'.$@; 
    $file_contents=<$infile>; 
    close ($infile); 
  } 
  print 'size of file:'.length($file_contents)."\n"; 
  return $file_contents; 
  } #do_something else
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perl argin.pl argin.pl
Name of file:argin.pl
size of file:684
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See Getopt::Long and/or perlvar on @ARGV maybe?

If that doesn't answer your question, can you maybe post a 10 line script that demonstrates the problem you have?

Hi root, Thanks for your help. I have an idea of how handle command line arguments given to a script. Kindly go through the problem and background as below: Background : A script written to perform operation and all the depending subroutines for the script are in main library. Here no input arguments were accepted Problem : Now the input to file is an XML file. But I don't want to modify anything in local script. whereas when I call the script with xml file as a command line input, I should be able to read it directly in library. Is there a way to do this?

Have you looked at Getopt::Long and @ARGV?

What problems do you have applying the ideas discussed there to your program?

Maybe you also want to look at perlsub to find how to pass parameters to subroutines?