You can use shift or read from @ARGV like so...

use strict;

my $arg = shift;

my @args = @ARGV;

print "$arg\n";

foreach (@ARGV) {
    print $_, "\n";
}
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Hope that helps :).

For very simple uses you can simply shift the values one at a time of the @ARGV array. This is very easy to do for short throw-away applications, but becomes an unmanagable mess for anything more complex. For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
my $argument_1 = shift;
die "Invalid input" unless $argument_1;
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A better approach is to use one of the many Getopt modules. I think that both Getopt::std and Getopt::Long have both been part of the core Perl for some time, so you should have them on your system already.

For example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Std;
getopt('oDI');
print "\nOption o = $opt_o";
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You should find that perldoc will give you the full details of both modules, and any additional ones you install.

ok thanks guys... turns out a simple shift and some error-checking was enough... i'm not that advanced into perl to take a look at modules yet but thanks all the same dave, ajt... i was only looking for a quick solution since the core of the script is going to be a tough one (so expect more questions from me :-))... at least it's a comfort to know that there are modules to handle this for more complicated arguments

cheers!

dave hj~

Also, you might want to take a peek at Pod::Usage for creating help messages with variable verbosity.

This might be overkill for your program, but I found it very useful for larger tools.

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.
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   MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

Checkout this node. You can also see a working example.