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From: bobg+@andrew.cmu.edu (Robert Steven Glickstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Novice surprise
Message-ID: <cbhl9z200VsnE1=K1b@andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 91 21:54:07 GMT
Organization: Information Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
Lines: 47


Today I ran my very first Perl program; it was generated by a2p.  The
awk program was:

    BEGIN {x = 0}
    $0 == "" {x = 1}
    x == 1

The perl program produced was:

    eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^([A-Za-z_]+=)(.*)/ && shift;
    			# process any FOO=bar switches

    $x = 0;

    while (<>) {
        chop;	# strip record separator
        if ($_ eq '') {
	    $x = 1;
        }
        print $_ if $x == 1;
    }

The idea:  skip the first lines of the input until a blank line is
found, then start echoing the lines.  The awk program worked fine, the
perl program did not.  I kept getting "cannot open file" errors.

It was two hours of staring at this stupid thing before I realized
that the problem was this:  The filenames that I was passing as
arguments happened to begin with a "+".  Since I didn't have
write-access, I got a "cannot open file" error.  I couldn't figure out
a way to circumvent this in Perl, so instead of the command-line

    perlscript +a +b +c

I used

    perlscript ./+a ./+b ./+c

The big question:  What is the *right* way around this problem?

______________                  _____________________________
Bob Glickstein                | Internet: bobg@andrew.cmu.edu
Information Technology Center | Bitnet:   bobg%andrew@cmuccvma.bitnet
Carnegie Mellon University    | UUCP:     ...!harvard!andrew.cmu.edu!bobg
Pittsburgh, PA  15213-3890    |
(412) 268-6743                | Sinners can repent, but stupid is forever