That's quite cleverly done.

Just, according to -X is -t defaulting to STDIN. So you could spare a word.

2 other alternatives come to mind ...

... iterator

An alternative approach which seems cleaner to me could be to create an iterator which either implements:

sub iter { shift @ARGV } °

or

sub iter {scalar <STDIN>} *

And use it in the loop

 
while (  ($id) = iter() ) { 
   ...
}

[download]

... override

Another way could be to override readline (which is the iterator behind <> ) on demand to iterate over @ARGV.

Both ideas untested since I'm posting from mobile.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

°) Could be that you need

sub iter { shift @ARGV //()}

instead, I'm afraid shift will return undef if the array is exhausted.

*) updated scalar

In reply to Re: Getting data from either ARGV or STDIN by LanX
in thread Getting data from either ARGV or STDIN by sleet

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