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*