Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Working with @ARGV and Script Arguments

One aspect of running Perl scripts that I've sort of sidestepped over the last few days is that of dealing with command-line arguments. Yesterday we talked a bit about Perl's own switches (-e, -w) and so on, but what if you want to actually pass switches or arguments to your own scripts—how do you handle those? That's what we'll discuss in this section: script arguments in general, and handling script switches.

Anatomy of the @ARGV

When you call a Perl script with arguments beyond the name of the script, those arguments are stored in the special global list @ARGV (on the Mac, for droplets, @ARGV will be the filenames that were dropped onto the droplet). You can process this array the same way you would ...