You seem to be confused about the difference between command-line arguments and piping. If you say ls *.txt | ./myscript.pl, the STDOUT output of ls is going to STDIN of your script. Yet you are trying to get the names of those .txt files from @ARGV.

To actually get the filenames from the piped input, do something like:

  chomp( my @filenames = <STDIN> );
  for (@filenames) {
    ... # open, read, etc
  }
[download]

A better solution for your particular example, though, is Zaxo's advice above. Use the -n option, or use the magic while (<>) loop: both automatically use the members of @ARGV as filenames and open them in sequence for you, reducing the code you've written to a one-liner.

Alternately, look at xargs to do something like this:

  $ ls *.txt | xargs ./myscript.pl
[download]

.. which takes the name of each txt file (as given by ls) and passes it as a command-line argument (i.e, an element of @ARGV) to myscript.pl (plus or minus quoting/escaping issues)

blokhead