If your program is not interactive, just follow the *NIX tradition, i.e. just print your output and let the user decide to page it if necessary, like:

yourscript.pl | less

If your program is interactive (i.e. it waits for input from the user) then this is not feasible. You can either write your own little pager using for example Curses, or you can yet again follow a well established *NIX convention and run the user's favourite pager, which is usually stored in $ENV{PAGER}.

Using the user's pager has the definite advantages of not having to reinvent the wheel (think lazy (-;) and presenting the user with a well-known interface for viewing long files.

If you use system, it is a good idea to pass a list and not a single scalar as an argument: the single scalar could be interpreted by the shell (for example if it has wildcards) with possibly nasty or anyway unwanted side effects.


In reply to Re: Paging on input/file by trantor
in thread Paging on input/file by hotshot

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.