Perl for C Programmers

Opening a File (Revisited)

As you already know, to open a file for reading, you use the following statement:

open FILE_VAR, "<file_in.txt";

And to open a file for writing, you use this statement:

open FILE_VAR, ">file_out.txt";

Perl uses the special character > to indicate that it should open a file for writing and < for a read indicator.

Other special characters are recognized as well. For example, if you want to append to a file, use the >> indicator:

open LOG_FILE, ">>command.log";

Opening a Pipe

Suppose that you are going to write a report to the screen. If you just write the report, the data scrolls off the top of the screen. So to be nice, you want to write out a page of data and wait for the user to press a key. Then you would write ...