<> and @ARGV

If the connection between <> and @ARGV caught you by surprise, I'm afraid you haven't been reading very carefully.

And <> doesn't read from the files in @ARGV when there's nothing on stdin. It's the other way around. It reads from stdin only when @ARGV is empty (or contains "-").

-- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos

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RE: and @ARGV by beppu (Hermit) on Jul 28, 2000 at 16:20 UTC
Well, I went and looked at the Camel book again, and (to my surprise) the behaviour was documented. So yes -- I was not reading carefully, but... I still think I wasn't out of my mind to be surprised. The only things I've used the angled brackets for are reading from file handles and globbing. The connection between <> and @ARGV doesn't seem obvious to me. It's a special-case behaviour. I've only been w/ Perl for 1.5 years. Give me time. :)	[reply]
RE: RE: and @ARGV by chip (Curate) on Jul 28, 2000 at 22:59 UTC
Sorry if I came off as being snippy. It's just that the use of `<>` and `@ARGV` is so common in just about every text-oriented Perl script ever written.... I was just surprised that your experience was so atypical. It's as if C programmer were surprised to find that if you're in a `while`, and you do a `return`, it gets you out. (BTW, that was a real question from a real former cow orker. He's probably writing VB these days.) -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos	[reply] [d/l] [select]