Better Way to Do It

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

Well i was bore so i tryed to do the excersises on the tutorial section of perlmonks i found this one: Write a program that prompts the user for the name of a file to open and then reads in the file line by line. When it has finished reading the file it should print the lines in reverse order with this solution:

   #!/usr/bin/perl
   2: 
   3: #this program prompts a user for the name of a source file
   4: #and then reads from the file line by line.  Once it is done
   5: #reading the file it prints the lines of the file in reverse ord
+er
   6: 
   7: print "What is the name of the source file? ";
   8: $file=<>;
   9: chomp($file);
  10: open FILE, "<$file";
  11: while(<FILE>){
  12:    push @lines,$_;
  13: }
  14: foreach(reverse @lines){
  15:    print $_;
  16: }
  17: close FILE;
[download]

the program is functional but i just think in this way


#!perl -w

use strict;

my $file;

print "Enter a filename: ";
chomp ( $file = <STDIN> );

open ( FILE, "$file" );
for (reverse (<FILE>)){
    print;
}

close FILE;
[download]

i just want to know which is better is something like a perl golf :D, thx

Comment on Better Way to Do It Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Better Way to Do It by broquaint (Abbot) on May 17, 2003 at 22:22 UTC
A couple of things, you don't need to quote variables in `perl` as you might in the shell and you might want to check for the existence of the file. Here's my take on the exercise `{ print "Enter filename: "; chomp($f = <STDIN>); print "invalid file" and redo unless -f $f and -r $f; } open(f) and print reverse <f>;` [download] A little idiomatic admittedly, but that's fine by me :) HTH `_________ broquaint`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Better Way to Do It by Abigail-II (Bishop) on May 17, 2003 at 23:03 UTC
Your solution is less powerful than other presented solutions. Due to your explicite requirements only standard files can be given, your program can't unleash the power of the magical `open`. Your program can't reverse text given on standard input, or what comes from a pipe. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Re: Better Way to Do It by broquaint (Abbot) on May 17, 2003 at 23:16 UTC
Your solution is less powerful than other presented solutions Since the exercise was to print a file in reversed order, and that's what my code does, I'm hardly going to be loosing any sleep over this ;) HTH `_________ broquaint`	[reply]
Re: Better Way to Do It by Chady (Priest) on May 18, 2003 at 11:33 UTC
just for fun: print "Enter filename: "; my $file = <>; print `tac $file`; [download] Note: `epyt` doesn't work as you expect under DOS. ;) He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life. Chady \| http://chady.net/	[reply] [d/l] [select]