A Better Way to Slurp
In an earlier entry (was it really six years ago?) I talked about the usage of $/ and the -0 command-line option to Perl to change the input delimiter. But there’s another way to read in “slurp” mode that isn’t described there, the File::Slurp Perl module.
File::Slurp provides a function read_file, which given a filename, returns its contents as a single string if called in scalar context (in array context, returns an array of lines, as defined by whatever delimiter $/ is set to). It’s basically the same thing as setting $/ to the empty string and reading, but contained in a subroutine.
There is also a subroutine write_file, which lets you “spew” the contents of a string into a file. It saves you a few lines of code: open, print, and close. It can also be called as overwrite_file as a synonym, or you can call append_file to add to rather than overwrite a file.
Finally, read_dir lets you get the contents of a directory in one go, which is a lot more convenient than using opendir/readdir.