Question

I’m writing a Perl script, and I’d like a way to have the user enter a file or a file containing a list of files in $ARGV[0].

The current way that I’m doing it is to check if the filename starts with an @, if it does, then I treat that file as a list of filenames.

This is definitely not the ideal way to do it, because I’ve noticed that @ is a special character in bash (What does it do by the way? I’ve only seen it used in $@ in bash).

Answer 1

You can specify additional parameter on your command line to treat it differenly e.g.

perl script.pl file

for reading file‘s content, or

perl script.pl -l file

for reading list of files from file.

You can use getopt module for easier parsing of input arguments.