How can I process options using Perl in -n or -p mode?

Question

When running perl -n or perl -p, each command line argument is taken as a file to be opened and processed line by line. If you want to pass command line switches to that script, how can I do that?

Answer 1

There are three primary ways of passing information to Perl without using STDIN or external storage.

• Arguments

  When using -n or -p, extract the arguments in the BEGIN block.

  perl -ne'BEGIN { ($x,$y)=splice(@ARGV,0,2) } f($x,$y)' -- "$x" "$y" ...
  

• Command-line options

  In a full program, you'd use Getopt::Long, but perl -s will do fine here.

  perl -sne'f($x,$y)' -- -x="$x" -y="$y" -- ...
  

• Environment variables

  X="$x" Y="$y" perl -ne'f($ENV{X},$ENV{Y})' -- ...