Hello TonyNY,

You should always code with

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

at the head of your script, in which case, if $ARGV[2] is undefined, the statement chomp $id; will generate a warning. So the correct logic is:

use strict;
use warnings;

my ($pkgname, $envname, $id) = @ARGV;

if (defined $id)
{
    chomp $id;
    print "Third argument: >$id<\n";
}
else
{
    print "No third argument\n";
}
[download]

BTW, these statements:

chomp;
s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # trim spaces
[download]

operate on the default variable $_, which is not initialised in the code snippet you show.

Hope that helps,

I was ale to accomplish what I need to do by using the following. Thanks for your help.

my $id = $ARGV[2];
if (not defined $id) {
print "$id is not defined";
} else {
print "$id is defined";
}
[download]

I suspect you want

if (not defined $id) {
print '$id is not defined';
[download]

Notice the change in quotes, inside double quotes $id will try to interpolate, and it is undefined

You may want to investigate Getopt::Std and Getopt::Long.

my $id = $ARGV[2];
chomp $id;
[download]

I don't understand how you intend to get something into  $ARGV[2] and thence into  $id that can then be chomp-ed off of it. Will you be playing perverse games with the  $/ special variable? What's really going on here?

"sundial", how does such a comment even begin to help the OP with his question?