Perl | Useful File-handling functions

Perl was originally developed for the text processing like extracting the required information from a specified text file and for converting the text file into a different form. These operations can be performed by the use of various inbuilt file functions.

Example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Opening a File in Read-only mode
open(fh, "<", "File_to_be_read.txt");

# Reading next character from the file
$ch = getc(fh)

# Printing the read character
print"Character read from the file is $ch";

# Closing the File
close(fh);

Output:

Following are some of the useful functions in Perl to work on Files:

Function	Description
glob()	Used to print the files present in a directory passed to it as an argument
tell()	Used to get the position of the read pointer in a File with the use of its FileHandle
getc()	Used to read the next character from the file whose File Handle is passed to it as argument
reverse()	Returns the List in reverse order when used in List context and returns a concatenated string of the values of the List, with each character of the string in the opposite order when used in scalar context
rename()	Renames the old name of a file to a new name as given by the user