Don't mind the downvotes
Stef, it's a perfectly reasonable question for a new Perl user.
I see that the question has been suitably answered, but I thought I'd elaborate a little more on *how* it was answered. There is a command-line tool called "perldoc" which is invaluable to Perl coders. It is roughly equivalent to "man" in the unix world. If you want to know how to use a module (probably downloaded from
CPAN), you can type
perldoc Module::Name, replacing "Module::Name" with the actual name of the module.
Perldoc also has a feature that describes built-in functions in Perl, such as
printf and
sprintf. You can access this by typing
perldoc -f function_name, again replacing "function_name" with the actual function. With this tool, you wouldn't have had to wait for a reply from perlmonks. :)
For more information on "perldoc", simply type
perldoc perldoc. Enjoy!