Opening and Closing Files in Perl

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Reading Files in Perl

Listing C.8 displays the contents of the file somedata.txt that we will use for the purposes of illustrating how to read the contents of a file.

Listing C.8 somedata.txt

# this is a comment line Jones:Tom:1000 Smith:Ann:2000 Smith:Bill:3000

Listing C.9 displays the contents of readFile1.pl, which is a Perl script that reads the contents of the file somedata.txt.

Listing C.9 readFile1.pl

my($count)       = 0; my($currentLine) = ""; my($fileName)    = "somedata.txt"; open(INPUT, "<$fileName") || die "Cannot open $fileName: $!\n"; while($currentLine = <INPUT>) {    $count++; } print "File $fileName contains $count lines\n";

Remarks

You can launch the Perl script readFile1.pl in Listing C.9 from the command line as follows:

perl -w readFile1.pl

If the file was opened successfully, you will see the following output:

File somedata.txt contains 5 lines

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