For the particular example you posted 

my $arg = shift @ARGV;

[download]
is one way to do it. There are a few billion others.

But, as you say, this is a very basic question, which makes me wonder, why are you trying to do this without learning the basics of Perl first? There are sources aplenty to do this. Trying to solve a programming problem by asking piecemeal questions like this one, without knowing the basics first, seems to me a crazy way to go about it. Are you under the gun to conjure up with some Perl code out of thin air?

the lowliest monk

In reply to Re: How do I read data passed to perl script by tlm
in thread How do I read data passed to perl script by dtharby

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