in reply to Getting user input from STDIN

Can you explain why you would not like to use Term::ReadLine? It is a core module since Perl 5.04.

To me it looks the same as saying, "I want to drop the end-of-line character but I do not want to use chop or chomp or substr> and regexes are evil too."

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom