G'day fouinix,

Welcome to the monastery.

I see you have your answer to the FILE vs. \*FILE issue.

You seem to want to use an array. You don't say why or how you intend to use that array. I'm guessing that you want to avoid creating a disk file (for \*FILE). If you have follow-up questions, clarification of those points may be useful in providing a response.

In the following code, I've created a subroutine to (roughly) emulate what $ctx->cat(...) is doing: emulate_ctx_cat(\*FILEHANDLE, $target). There's two blocks of code: the first creates a disk file from $target (compare with choroba's example) and prints its contents; the second creates an array from $target, manipulates the data in that array, and then shows that $target has not changed.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie qw{:all};

use Tie::File;

my $target_in =  './pm_1073422_test.txt';
my $target_out = './pm_1073422_test.out';

print "*** Using Disk File ***\n";
{
    open my $fh_out, '>', $target_out;
    emulate_ctx_cat($fh_out, $target_in);
    close $fh_out;

    system cat => $target_out;
    unlink $target_out;
}

print "*** Using Array ***\n";
{
    open my $fh_out, '+>', undef;
    emulate_ctx_cat($fh_out, $target_in);
    tie my @text, 'Tie::File', $fh_out;

    print "* Original Text *\n";
    print "$_\n" for @text;

    $text[2] = 'Modified line';
    print "* Modified Text *\n";
    print "$_\n" for @text;

    untie @text;
    close $fh_out;

    print "* Original File *\n";
    system cat => $target_in;
}

sub emulate_ctx_cat {
    my ($fh_out, $target) = @_;

    open my $fh_in, '<', $target;

    while (<$fh_in>) {
        print $fh_out $_;
    } 

    close $fh_in;
}
[download]

Output:

*** Using Disk File ***
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
*** Using Array ***
* Original Text *
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
* Modified Text *
Line 1
Line 2
Modified line
Line 4
* Original File *
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4
[download]

[If it's unfamiliar to you, see the documentation for open and Tie::File for an explanation of the syntax I've used.]

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