A minor but (IMO) important quibble: <STDIN> and <> are not identical constructs. If you use the script without command-line arguments, they are, but if a file is specified in @ARGV, reading from the magic filehandle (<>) will read from that file, while reading from STDIN (<STDIN>) will read from the standard input, aka the terminal.

Example code: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my $color;
print  "What is your favorite color? ";
chomp ($color = <STDIN>);
print <>;
print  "Just to check, your favorite color is $color, right? ";
$_ = <STDIN>;
if ( /^y/i ) { print "Phew!\n" }
else         { print "I don't believe you!\n"}

[download]

If run thus

perl myscript.pl random_file.txt

[download]
this should give us

What is your favorite color? Blue
[ contents of random_file.txt ]
Just to check, your favorite color is Blue, right?Yes!
Phew!

This is occasionally very useful behavior--I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was pretty much what you need, Satira.

And of course, in real quibble land, tachyon didn't mean an infinite loop, he meant a loop until the filehandle reaches EOF. :-) If you're looping on <>, this will take care of itself unless you do something foolish; if you're looping on STDIN, you can break out by giving the locally appropriate EOF character (control-D on most Unices and MacPerl, control-Z on Windows I think...).


If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have give us the railroads.
    --Michael Flanders

In reply to Re: Re: Searching and Replacing by ChemBoy
in thread Searching and Replacing by Satira

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