Print takes a series of things to print separated by commas. By default, print writes to the STDOUT file handle.
print “Woo Hoo\n”; ## print a string to STDOUT
$num = 42;
$str = ” Hoo”;
print “Woo”, $a, ” bbb $num”, “\n”; ## print several things
An optional first argument to print can specify the destination file handle. There is no comma after the file handle, but I always forget to omit it.
print FILE “Here”, ” there”, ” everywhere!”, “\n”; ## no comma after FILE
File Processing Example
As an example, here’s some code that opens each of the files listed in the @ARGV array, and reads in and prints out their contents to standard output…
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
require 5.004;
## Open each command line file and print its contents to standard out
foreach $fname (@ARGV) {
open(FILE, $fname) || die(“Could not open $fname\n”);
while($line = ) {
print $line;
}
close(FILE);
}
The above uses “die” to abort the program if one of the files cannot be opened. We could use a more flexible strategy where we print an error message for that file but continue to try to process the other files. Alternately we could use the function call exit(-1) to exit the program with an error code. Also, the following shift pattern is a common alternative way to iterate through an array…
while($fname = shift(@ARGV)) {…
