Built-in Arrays and Hashes

We have introduced a few special Perl variables, such as $. and $_. Perl also has a few built-in arrays.

@ARGV

One special array in Perl is the @ARGV array. This array is the collection of strings passed in on the command line. For example, if you execute your Perl program as

% perl program.pl these are a few pieces of data

then the array @ARGV contains the strings

these are a few pieces of data

Here is a program that will familiarize you with some common uses of the @ARGV array. The program raises the first argument to the second argument power. The first part of the program is error checking. See the folder Power.

 % type power.pl # # power.pl # die "usage: perl power.pl base power\n" unless $#ARGV == 1; die "first ...

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