Perl Cookbook

Opening a File

Problem

You want to read or write to a filename from Perl.

Solution

Use open for convenience, sysopen for precision, or the IO::File module to get an anonymous filehandle.

The open function takes two arguments: the filehandle to open and one string containing the filename and special characters indicating how to open it (the mode):

open(SOURCE, "< $path")
    or die "Couldn't open $path for reading: $!\n";

open(SINK, "> $path")
    or die "Couldn't open $path for writing: $!\n";

The sysopen function takes three or four arguments: filehandle, filename, mode, and an optional permissions value. The mode is a number constructed from constants provided by the Fcntl module:

use Fcntl;

sysopen(SOURCE, $path, O_RDONLY)
    or die "Couldn't open $path for reading: $!\n";

sysopen(SINK, $path, O_WRONLY)
    or die "Couldn't open $path for writing: $!\n";

The IO::File module’s new method accepts both open and sysopen style arguments and returns an anonymous filehandle. The new method also accepts a mode in the style of fopen (3):

use IO::File;

# like Perl's open
$fh = IO::File->new("> $filename")
    or die "Couldn't open $filename for writing: $!\n";

# like Perl's sysopen
$fh = IO::File->new($filename, O_WRONLY|O_CREAT)
    or die "Couldn't open $filename for writing: $!\n";

# like stdio's fopen(3)
$fh = IO::File->new($filename, "r+")
    or die "Couldn't open $filename for read and write: $!\n";

Discussion

All input and output goes through filehandles, whether filehandles are mentioned or not. Filehandles ...