When it's just a matter of giving perl a couple of file names, one for input and one for output, I really prefer having that stuff all on the command line, rather than requiring the perl script itself to prompt for an interactive response from the person running the script. There are a few ways to do this:
- expect input and output file names as command line args, which show up in @ARGV:
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $Usage = "$0 input_file.name output_file.name\n";
( @ARGV == 2 and -f $ARGV[0] ) or die $Usage;
open( IN, "<", $ARGV[0] ) or die "$ARGV[0]: $!";
open( OUT, ">", $ARGV[1] ) or die "$ARGV[1]: $!";
while (<IN>) {
tr/a-zA-Z/A-Za-z/; # invert case, just for fun
print OUT;
}
- use output redirection in the shell command (and just an input file-name arg, or input redirection, or a pipe), which means the perl script does not need to explicitly open anything:
#!/usr/bin/perl
my $Usage = "Usage: $0 [<] input.file > output.file\n";
die $Usage if (( @ARGV > 0 ) ^ ( -t STDIN ));
while (<>) {
tr/a-zA-Z/A-Za-z/; # invert case, just for fun
print;
}
(In the second example, the "if" condition will cause the script to die with with usage summary if you run it with no args
and STDIN is not coming from a pipe or redirection.)
As for your usage of "tr///", I wonder what you're trying to accomplish with tr/a-zA-Z/0-310/ because that really means:
a -> 0 \
b -> 1 \ "0-3" defines a continuous character range
c -> 2 / starting at "0", ending at "3", incl. "1" & "2"
d -> 3 /
e -> 1
fg-zA-Z -> 0
When I see a dash used between two numerics like that with the tr/// operator, my first impression is that the intent is probably different from the actual result...
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: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.