Perl how to read a line from a file handle that is an array element

Question

My perl script takes any number of files, opens them, and reads one line from each. But it\'s not working. Here\'s my code.

#!/bin/perl
$numfile = scalar @ARGV         


        

Answer 1

Your <> is being interpreted as a file glob instead of a readline.

Use the following to explicitly specify your intent:

$line[$i] = readline $fh[$i];

Answer 2

[Not an answer, but a comment that doesn't fit as a comment]

Always use use strict; use warnings;. You are severely handicapping yourself without them.

You don't need to use multiple handles since you never need more than one at a time.

Some other cleanups:

#!/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my @first_lines;

for my $qfn (@ARGV)
{
    open(my $fh, '<', $qfn)
        or die("Can't open $qfn: $!\n");

    push @first_lines, scalar( <$fh> );
}

for my $i (0..$#first_lines)
{ 
    print  "$i => $first_lines[$i]"; 
}

Answer 3

Use readline instead of <>.

perlop says:

If what's within the angle brackets is neither a filehandle nor a simple scalar variable containing a filehandle name, typeglob, or typeglob reference, it is interpreted as a filename pattern to be globbed