lanX's comment at
Re: Going through a big file excellently explains the difference between how
for slurps the whole lot into an array, but
while does it line by line.
The only comment I would add is why bother to have it open the files manually when it can be done implicitly?
while (<>) {
}
does the job. Arguments other than the file(s) you want to process should be flags. In fact, you don't even need to write this code as it is automatically assumed when you run perl with flags such as
-n or
-p. See
perlrun for more information.
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