Perl files FAQ: How do I open and read files in Perl?
This article demonstrates how to open and read files in Perl. As you'll see, the creators of Perl thought this was a fundamental activity, and they've made it as easy as possible. (That's one of the things I really like about Perl - many of the routine, daily programming tasks have been made very easy with this language.) If you've used other "structured" languages, such as C or FORTRAN, you'll appreciate how easy it is to open a file and create a loop to read data from the file.