There are several ways to do this.

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.