That's a pretty wide open question the answer to which depends on a lot of factors. More factors than I'd care to enumerate here.

One of my personal favorites for working with files (although I use opendir and plain old open more often is Tie::File which allows you to treat a file as if it were an array. Pretty slick if you ask me.

That said I am an adherent to the old adage "right tool for the job." If open does the job, and it does really well, then use it. Don't get fancy unless you have a real need to.

There is a real temptation when you spot something "neat" that you end up having a solution in search of a problem. A good example of that is when I got my first router and router table for wood working. Pretty soon I was doing all sorts of fancy edging work on every wood project I had. I realized I'd overstepped the utility of it when I used a coving bit to round off the edges really pretty for something that was going to be out of sight anyway.

Writing code is like that too. We get tempted to use that fancy programming technique when brute force is a quicker way to get the job done.

Just some thoughts...

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg

In reply to Re: Processing multiple files by blue_cowdawg
in thread Processing multiple files by mocnii

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.