You can use:

1. Getopt::Std Getopt::Long or any of the other Getopt:: modules
2. use the -s argument the invokes perls native ARGV parsing.
3. hand parse @ARGV (ick)

I have grown to like -s due to its simplicity. BrowserUk introduced to me to it. Here is a short example:

#!/usr/bin/perl -sw

use strict;

our $FILE;
our $CAT        ||= 79;
our $VERBOSE    ||= 1;

die "Usage: $0 -FILE=list [-CAT=$CAT] [-VERBOSE=$VERBOSE]\n"
    unless $FILE and -f $FILE;
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