How to read Perl command-line arguments

Perl FAQ: How do I read command-line arguments in Perl?

If you want to handle simple Perl command line arguments, such as filenames and strings, this tutorial is for you. If you want to handle command-line options (flags) in your Perl scripts (like "-h" or "--help"), this new Perl getopts command line options/flags tutorial is what you need.

Perl command line args and the @ARGV array

With Perl, command-line arguments are stored in a special array named @ARGV. So you just need to read from that array to access your script's command-line arguments.

ARGV array elements: In the ARGV array, $ARGV[0] contains the first argument, $ARGV[1] contains the second argument, etc. So if you're just looking for one command line argument you can test for $ARGV[0], and if you're looking for two you can also test for $ARGV[1], and so on.

ARGV array size: The variable $#ARGV is the subscript of the last element of the @ARGV array, and because the array is zero-based, the number of arguments given on the command line is $#ARGV + 1.

Example 1: A typical Perl command line args example

A typical Perl script that uses command-line arguments will (a) test for the number of command line arguments the user supplied and then (b) attempt to use them. Here's a simple Perl script named name.pl that expects to see two command-line arguments, a person's first name and last name, and then prints them:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# (1) quit unless we have the correct number of command-line args
$num_args = $#ARGV + 1;
if ($num_args != 2) {
  print "\nUsage: name.pl first_name last_name\n";
  exit;
}

# (2) we got two command line args, so assume they are the
# first name and last name
$first_name=$ARGV[0];
$last_name=$ARGV[1];

print "Hello, $first_name $last_name\n";

This is fairly straightforward, where adding 1 to $#ARGV strikes me as the only really unusual thing.

To test this script on a Unix/Linux system, just create a file named name.pl, then issue this command to make the script executable:

chmod +x name.pl

Then run the script like this:

./name.pl Alvin Alexander

Or, if you want to see the usage statement, run the script without any command line arguments, like this:

./name.pl

Example 2: Perl command line arguments in a for loop

For a second example, here's how you might work through the command line arguments using a Perl for loop:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#---------------------#
#  PROGRAM:  argv.pl  #
#---------------------#

$numArgs = $#ARGV + 1;
print "thanks, you gave me $numArgs command-line arguments:\n";

foreach $argnum (0 .. $#ARGV) {
  print "$ARGV[$argnum]\n";
}

Running the example Perl command line program

To demonstrate how this works, if you run this Perl command line args program from a Unix command-line like this:

./argv.pl 1 2 3 4

or, from a DOS command-line like this

perl argv.pl 1 2 3 4

you'll get this result:

thanks, you gave me 4 command-line arguments:
1
2
3
4

As you can see, it prints all the command line arguments you supply to the Perl program.

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