Maybe now is a good moment to step back and explain in plain English what you want the script to do.

From your various replies, it seems to me that you want your script to read from STDIN if there is input piped to it, but not read from STDIN when it is launched interactively.

The easy approach would be to use the -t test (or even better, -p) to check whether STDIN is connected to an interactive terminal or not.

In your commented reference to 1175906, you erroneously state that there was a change in 5.22 in the handling of @ARGV resp. while( <> ), but the comments there state that no such change happened between 5.002 and 5.24. You might want to revisit that node and maybe update your comment accordingly.


In reply to Re: Need pipe and parameter help by Corion
in thread Need pipe and parameter help by Todd Chester

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.