Now if you want the arguement to be a random line in dict, than one easy way to go about this is to record the ammount of lines, and read from the file and skip until $. = the random number between 1..LAST_LINE. Because code size is an issue that solution is probably the best for you.
Actually, a slightly more efficient solution is the following gem, slightly adapted from perlfaq5: 
open my $fh, "somefile" or die $!;

my $line;
rand($.) < 1 && ($line = $_) while <$fh>;

[download]
This sets $line to a uniform, random line from "somefile" and it has the advantage of only reading through the file once. For that reason (and the fact that the important stuff can be reduced to a one-liner), it's probably more concise than the naïve solution!

blokhead

In reply to Re^2: Using <> in the presence of @ARGV by blokhead
in thread Using <> in the presence of @ARGV by eibwen

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