Stupid @ARGV question

jaubertmoniker has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

OK. I am new to perl, and only really use it as a hobby. I was writing a (very short) program to output certain lines from files specified at the command line. I noticed that, unless I use @ARGV = reverse @ARGV;, I get lines from the files in the reverse order in which I specified (Does that make sense?). In other words:

>perl myfile.pl file1 file2
[download]

outputs in the form:
-----lines from file2-----
-----lines from file1-----
etc. Is this supposed to happen? I am using ActivePerl under Win32, if that makes any difference. Also, are such "pre-defined variables" (@ARGV, and the like) case-sensitive? My background is in such obsolescent languages as BASIC and Pascal, so I am not used to certain rules.

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Re: Stupid @ARGV question by suaveant (Parson) on Jun 22, 2001 at 19:09 UTC
You should post some of your code... are you doing a pop @ARGV to get items, if so, that would explain it. In that case you should use shift instead. - Ant	[reply]
Re: Stupid @ARGV question by runrig (Abbot) on Jun 22, 2001 at 19:19 UTC
In addition to what everyone else said, if you use the '<>' operator, you may not even have to deal with @ARGV explicitly (and input should be processed in the order specified on the command line), though in that case you may want to know about '$ARGV' and/or the -n or -p command line parameters. See perldocs perlop, perlrun and perlvar.	[reply]
Re: Stupid @ARGV question by holygrail (Scribe) on Jun 22, 2001 at 18:59 UTC
As far as I know in your case `$ARGV[0]` is 'file1', and `$ARGV[1]` is 'file2'. The output depends on your program though, of which you have not included any source... For the case-sensitivity: Perl variables are case sensitive, so @argv is something else than @ARGV... --HolyGrail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Stupid @ARGV question by Aighearach (Initiate) on Jun 22, 2001 at 19:11 UTC
Post your code and we can help better :) Maybe you are processing @ARGV with `pop` instead of either `shift` or `foreach(@ARGV){...}` -- Snazzy tagline here	[reply] [d/l]