Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!star.cs.vu.nl!gpvos
From: gpvos@cs.vu.nl (Gerben 'P' Vos)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Perl STDIN and ARGV
Message-ID: <8876@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 30 Jan 91 00:21:07 GMT
References: <1991Jan28.083825.15064@sgitokyo.nsg.sgi.com>
Sender: news@cs.vu.nl
Lines: 30

kandall@sgitokyo.nsg.sgi.com (Michael Kandall) writes:

>A common UNIX(tm) System utility usage is to process command line args,
>and if they are not present to process stdin.

>What's the standard paradigm for switching between these two in Perl?

Perl handles this automagically with the <> construct.

while (<>)
	{
	&do_what_you_want($_);
	}

>Can a FILEHANDLE be associated with an arbitrary array?  A natural
>equivalence would be one array element per line.

If you mean what i think you mean, you can't. You can, however, slurp in
a whole file into an array (one element per line), work on it, and then
print the whole thing, along the lines of

open(FILE, "foo");
@array = <FILE>; # slurp
close(FILE);

&dwim(@array);

open(FILE, ">foo");
print @array; # not sure about the line separators, check out yourself.
close(FILE);