Perl - while (<>) file handling

cycle, filehandle, perl, while-loop

Solution

The diamond operator does not concatenate the files, it just opens and reads them consecutively. How you control this depends on how you need it controlled. A simple way to check when we have read the last line of a file is to use `eof`:

while (<>) {
    chomp;             # remove newline
    print;             # print the line
    print "\n" if eof; # at end of file, print a newline
}

You can also consider a counter to keep track of which file in order you are processing

$counter++ if eof;

Note that this count will increase by one at the last line of the file, so do not use it prematurely.

If you want to keep track of line number `$.` in the current file handle, you can `close` the ARGV file handle to reset this counter:

while (<>) {
    print "line $. : ", $_;
    close ARGV if eof;
}

Problem

A simple program with `while( <> )` handles files given as arguments (`./program 1.file 2.file 3.file`) and standard input of Unix systems. I think it concatenates them together in one file and work is line by line. The problem is, how do I know that I'm working with the first file? And then with the second one. For a simple example, I want to print the file's content in one line. ``` while( <> ){ print "\n" if (it's the second file already); print $_; } ```

Original source

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