<> reads from @ARGV, so you can just modify @ARGV if you want special behaviour. In your case, remove the first element from @ARGV, or use Getopt::Long to introduce a command line switch.

thanks for the reply.
I see, so a shift will do the trick right ?
shift @ARGV;

oh jz, reading my post now I realized the C comments..please ignore it, I still learning..

Update: ran some more code and the first part here is not right.

Just a little point, <> reads from STDIN, not @ARGV. Looks like a typo to me.

For the poster, I showed some code below. In Perl @ARGV has the command line args. In C, char **argv, array of pointers to strings. Way easier in Perl! Perl does have equivalent to C getopts with many flavors.

<> only reads from STDIN if @ARGV is empty:

@ARGV=($0,$0,$0);
print for <>;
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You can nearly do this with just <> and without touching @ARGV. First read eof then consider:

while( <> ) {
    print "First: $_";
    last if eof;    # Stop at end of /first/ file
}
while( <> ) {
    print;
}
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But this actually does special processing of the first non-empty file, not the first file. Detecting that the first file is non-empty without directly modifying @ARGV is trickier:

my $args= @ARGV;
if(     ! eof()          # Prime the <> pump
    &&  @ARGV == $args-1 # Did we not move past the first file?
) {
    while( <> ) {
        print "First: $_";
        last if eof;
    }
}
while( <> ) {
    print;
}
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In any case, I find it an interesting solution.

(Updated within seconds of posting to replace a near solution with a real solution.)

sweet, this first exemple looks quite clean, now I have to choose between poping the @ARGV or an extra if, although my C mind says "no useless if's" I guess I'll use it.

>perl my_prog somename name2 name3 name4
>perl my_prog somename name2
>perl my_prog somename
>perl my_prog *.txt
Here is the code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

die "must have at least 2 files\n" if @ARGV <2;
my ($first_file, @other_files) = @ARGV;

open(IN, '<', "$first_file") || die "can't open $first_file $!";
while (<IN>)
{
   #work on each line in the first file
}

foreach my $file (@other_files)
{
   open (IN, "<", $file) or die "can't open $file $!";
   while (<IN>)
   {
      #work on each line in the sub files
   }  
}
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