Question

I want to read in mulitple files from a directory and store each value in a unique variable so I can print it out later with a descriptive header. The file names have a common prefix, but are unique.

I know how to open up one file, but is there an efficient way to open up many files? or do i have open unique file handles for each one? thanks.

Filenames have a common prefix like (abc_*):

abc_foo_dir
abc_bar.dat1.20101208
abc_bar.dat2.20101209

Example opening up first file:

open FILE, "< /home/test/data/abc_foo_dir";
while (<FILE>) {
my $line = $_;
chomp($line);
print "$line\n";
}
close FILE;

Answer 1

You say “store each value in a unique variable”, but this is actually a task for a hash table.

my %file_contents;
foreach my $filename (qw(...filenames here... or use a glob to fetch them))
{
    open my $fh, '<', $filename or die "Cannot open $filename: $!";
    local $/;   # enable slurp mode

    # read in the entire contents of the file and store in the hash
    $file_contents{$filename} = <$fh>;

    # this would close automatically when going out of scope,
    # but it's nice to be explicit
    close $fh;
}

You can iterate through all the keys later with keys %file_contents, but if you aren’t familiar with how to work with hashes, I urge you to read perldoc perldata and perldoc perlsyn.