Minimal Perl

Glossary

argument

When used in the context of a Unix command line, this term refers to one of the “words” separated by unquoted whitespace characters that may appear after the command’s name. For example, the following ls command has two arguments—one is an option, and the other a filename:

ls –l /tmp

The first echo command that follows has only one argument, because quoted strings aren’t split into their constituent words by the Shell as unquoted ones are. The second command has only four arguments, because redirection requests such as “> filename” are removed by the Shell before arguments are allocated:

echo 'This is one string'           # one argument
echo  Here are four words > save    # four arguments

When used in the context of a Perl function or a user-defined ...