Output to file question

[dannyp]

Can some one tell me how to output what is in a variable to a file.
I have the variable $mac. Im on a unix machine. How do I get what is in $mac to save to a file on the unix box. Thanks

[ysth]

One way:

use File::Slurp "write_file";
write_file("filename", $mac) or die "Error writing to file: $!";

or, more traditionally,

open my $handle, "> filename" or die "Couldn't open file: $!";
print $handle $mac;
close $handle;

(Ideally, you should check if the print and close fail also; this is commonly overlooked.)

[dannyp]

Thanks

[swkronenfeld]

I just want to mention, since it sounds like you are a beginner in Perl, that the method given by ysth will overwrite the contents of your file. If you want to append to a file, you need to open the file as

open my $handle, ">> filename" or die "Couldn't open file: $!";

Note the ">>" instead of ">".

You can print anything else to the file using



print $handle "Hello, world\n";
print $handle $some_other_var;


until the close command is executed on $handle.

[Your Mother]

There's also IO::All but you can check comprehension at the door. It's perl voodoo. Here's how to write it once to a file:

use IO::All;
$mac > io('/path/to/file.txt');

Or append it:

use IO::All;
$mac >> io('/path/to/file.txt');

[beable]

Here's another way, using the Tie::File module:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Tie::File;

my $mac = "this is the variable to be written to a file";

# tie array to output file
tie my @array, 'Tie::File', "outputfile.txt" or die "can't open file: 
+$!";

# write $mac to file
push @array, $mac;

# all finished
untie @array;

__END__