Perl for C Programmers

File Handling Package

If you are doing more than just simple I/O, then you’ll probably want to use the IO::Handle package. This package provides several useful functions that allow you to manipulate a file.

These functions allow you to do things such as seek to a given location in a file, truncate a file, get file status information (similar to the C stat(2) function), and other tasks.

For example, one problem with STDOUT is that it is buffered if you are writing to something other than the console. This normally is not a problem, but in some circumstances (such as writing to a pipe), this can be a problem.

The solution is to tell Perl to flush STDOUT after each output call. This is done using the autoflush method:

STDOUT–>autoflush(1);

For ...