http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=929360


in reply to Testing <>

You can detect the presence of waiting input using select, like:
use strict; use warnings; my $vector = ''; vec($vector,fileno(STDIN),1) = 1; if (select($vector,undef,undef,0.01)) { while (<>) { print; } }

where I have set a 10 millisecond timeout. Might be easier and more portable though to simply pass the filename as argument, and open it yourself. Like many other unix command line tools.

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Re^2: Testing <>
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 03, 2011 at 15:35 UTC
    That works for
    /tmp/>echo "hello world\n" | myscript
    and now called on its own doesn't hang
    /tmp/>myscript
    but there again its not clear how a usage message could be printed out.

    But it now fails when passed a filename

    /tmp/>cat x October 2011 S M Tu W Th F S 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 /tmp/myscript x
    it doesn't print the contents of the file :-( Isn't there a simpler solution? I thought that this would have a simple, forehead slapping, solution.