SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Reading

You can read from Perl's filehandles in a couple of different ways. The most common method is to use the file input operator, also called the angle operator (<>). To read a filehandle, simply put the filehandle name inside the angle operator and assign the value to a variable:

open(MYFILE, "myfile") || die "Can't open myfile: $!";
$line=<MYFILE>;        # Reading the filehandle

The angle operator in a scalar context reads one line of input from the file. When called after the entire file has been read, the angle operator returns the value undef.

By the Way

A “line of input” is usually considered to be a text stream until the first end-of-line sequence is found. In Unix, that end-of-line sequence is a newline character (ASCII 10); in DOS and ...