How to verify which flags were read using Getopt::Long in Perl?

myscript.pl

my $R;
my $f1 = "f1.log";
my $f2 = "f2.log";
my $f3 = "f3.log";

sub checkflags {

    GetOptions('a=s'    => \$f1,
               'b=s'    => \$f2,
               'c=s'    => \$f3,
    );

    open $R, '>', $f1 or die "Cannot open file\n"; # Line a
}

All the flags are optional.
If I call the script as
```
perl myscript.pl -a=filename
```
I need to append a .log to the filename before opening it at Line a.
For that I need to know whether GetOptions read something into $f1 or not.

How can this be done?

Solution

The simplest solution is to look for /[.]log$/ in $f1 and add it if it isn't present. Unfortunately that means that when the user passes in "foo.log" and wanted it to become "foo.log.log" it won't, but I think we can agree that user is a jerk.

A better option, that will make the jerk happy, is:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Getopt::Long;

GetOptions(
    'a=s'    => \my $f1,
    'b=s'    => \my $f2,
    'c=s'    => \my $f3,
);

if (defined $f1) {
    $f1 .= ".log";
} else {
    $f1 = "f1.log";
}

print "$f1\n";

If you want to define all of default names at the top, use a different variable to do that (it is probably better reading code anyway):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Getopt::Long;

my $default_f1 = "f1.log";
my $default_f2 = "f2.log";
my $default_f3 = "f3.log";

GetOptions(
    'a=s'    => \my $f1,
    'b=s'    => \my $f2,
    'c=s'    => \my $f3,
);

if (defined $f1) {
    $f1 .= ".log";
} else {
    $f1 = $default_f1;
}

print "$f1\n";