A total novice wishes to improve his grasp of Perl idioms. I've written a version of TAC from llama, using rob_au's notes about temporary files. I'm trying to do it without any slurping. Anyone like to critique this? 
# This is TAC
# reverse of cat
#
# Take a list of files as command line parameters
# and display the files on STDOUT
# last file first
# displaying each file backwards

# The files are concatenated in 'normal' order to a temporary file
# which is then read and displayed in reverse

# check the number of parameters..


my $argCount = $#ARGV+1;
if ($argCount<2)
    {
    exit 0;
    }
# open the temporary file
use Fcntl;
use POSIX;
my $outputFile;
do {
    $outputFile = tmpnam();
} until sysopen(OUTPUTFILE, $outputFile, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL, 0666);


# for every file..
while (@ARGV)
    {
    # open it

    my $fileName = shift;
    open ( MYFILE, " $fileName" ) or die "Cant open file $fileName";
    # and write each line to the temporary file..

    foreach (<MYFILE>)
        { print  OUTPUTFILE $_; }
    close MYFILE;
    print OUTPUTFILE "\n";
    print "Done $fileName -\n";
    }
close OUTPUTFILE;

# now read it in backwards..
my $inputFile = $outputFile;
open ( INPUTFILE, "< $inputFile");
my $char;
my $fromEnd=1; 
my $fileSize = (stat INPUTFILE)[7];
# we seek to a position a distance from the end, and read a single cha
+racter
# the distance from end increases till we hit the start
while ($fromEnd<$fileSize+1)
    {
    seek INPUTFILE, -$fromEnd, 2; # last char
    read INPUTFILE, $char, 1;
    print $char;
    ++$fromEnd;
    }


close INPUTFILE;
unlink $inputFile;

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In reply to Grade me! TAC by Frank_Zappa_lives

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