Special Variables in Alphabetical Order
We've alphabetized these entries according to the long variable name. If you don't know the long name of a variable, you can find it in the previous section. (Variables without alphabetical names are sorted to the front.)
So that we don't have to keep repeating ourselves, each variable description starts with one or more of these annotations:
Annotation | Meaning |
---|---|
XXX | Deprecated, do not use in anything new. |
NOT | Not Officially There (internal use only). |
ALL | Truly global, shared by all packages. |
PKG | Package global; each package can have its own. |
FHA | Filehandle attribute; one per I/O object. |
DYN | Dynamically scoped automatically (implies ALL). |
LEX | Lexically scoped at compile time. |
RO | Read only; raises an exception if you modify. |
When more than one variable name or symbol is listed, only the
short one is available by default. Using the
English
module makes the longer synonyms available
to the current package, and only to the current package, even if the
variable is marked [ALL].
Entries of the form method
HANDLE EXPR
show object-oriented interfaces to the
per-filehandle variables provided by the FileHandle
and various IO:
: modules. (You may also use the
HANDLE
->
method
(
EXPR
)
notation if you prefer.) These let you avoid having to call
select
to change the default output handle before
examining or changing that variable. Each such method returns the old
value of the FileHandle
attribute; a new value is
set if the EXPR
argument is supplied. If not supplied, most of the methods ...
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