Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

how do i pass a parameter to a perl script from the command line?

I want a script to write to a file, but the file needs to
be named in the command line, similar to :
perl myperlprogram.pl "writefile.doc".
so that in my program i would have a line such as
my $FILE = $[];

Also, are there any differences between Windows and Unix
when it comes to passing parameters?
Is this possible? I would be grateful for any help on this matter.

A practicing Monk

p.s. Do perl monks have to stay celibate? Something i wonder about...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Passing parameters to scripts
by moxliukas (Curate) on Aug 12, 2002 at 11:16 UTC

    All command line parameters are stored in @ARGV array. So you can access it directly like:

    my $file = $ARGV[0];

    [download]

    or even like this (modifying the array):

    my $file = shift @ARGV;

    [download]

    However if you need only to pass a file name as a parameter for opening it at a later stage, you can say

    while(<>) { }

    [download]

    straight away and this will read from the file on the command line.

    If you want to pass complex things on the command line (like options, etc), have a look at a module Getopt::Long

    And no, I don't think there is any difference in Unix and Windows in this respect.

    Just my 2 Lithuanian cents.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      There are differences in how the various shells interpret certain symbols, so what you may need to use for one shell might not work in another. For instance in *nix arguments are normally globbed by the OS, wheras in Win32 they are normally globbed by the program. Other difference would be quoting characters and escape rules.

      Yves / DeMerphq
      ---
      Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. -- E. W. Dijkstra (RIP)

[reply]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom