First of all, welcome to the Perl community!

As to your last question,

<STDIN>

will read whatever you type at the command line until you hit

Ctrl-Z <ENTER>(on Windows) or

Ctrl-D(on *nix)

Mentioning that you "need to use Perl in school" reminds me of my having to learn it so that I could maintain some Perl code for my job. I started reading Learning Perl and promptly fell in love with the language.

EDIT: Corrected for use on Windows. Thanks AnomalousMonk!

In reply to Re^3: "Can't open perl script..." :-( by molecules
in thread "Can't open perl script..." :-( by Erosia

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