You might want to use getopts() instead of getopt() as the latter requires the swtich to have an arg (i.e. you need to use it as scriptname -v somearg) getopts() provides this by : to the end of switch.

Also you should check for return value from getopt/s(). If you had checked for the return value you would have seen  broken usage with your code as is i.e. getopt()

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;

our $opt_v;
# print join(':',@ARGV), "\n";
my $ret = getopts('v');
die "broken usage\n" unless $ret;

print "V = ", $opt_v,$/ if defined $opt_v;
__END__
V = 1
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Yes, very astute, I am trying to set a verbose flag. :)

Thanks for your helpful reply. I should have used getopts() as getopt only takes opts with a value. I will take on board the other comments.

~Diz

Checking the return value from each of the Getopt::* variants is what makes these functions really useful. An idiom that I use almost constantly for command-line tool scripts goes like this:

my $Usage = "Usage: $0 -a [-b arg] whatever ...\n";

getopts( ... ) or die $Usage;
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When I need a reminder about the command line syntax for one of my scripts (this happens a lot), I just run it with "-?" as the only arg; since I never use "?" as an option flag, I always get the usage message.

Your code does not really match your output. Any way, < is redirect, and does not set -v.

use strict;
use Getopt::Std;

our $opt_v;
getopt('v');
print $opt_v;
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When you run it as perl -w blah.pl -v abc, it prints abc as expected.

The redirect is intentional, I included it in the example call in case that was affecting the outcome.

I am trying to set a verbose flag '-v' with no value; that's what I meant by "simple options". The real answer was to use getopts() rather than getopt(). The code matched the output: only the script name was changed to protect the innocent. :^)

Thanks for helping anyway.

~Diz