schwartz@cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) (01/20/90)
Larry writes: >$/ = "\0"; # line sep is something non-existent You know, I've always kind of disliked doing that. Suppose your file contains all possible byte values 0..255? Something loses. Maybe doing something like ``undef /;'' to make ``$/'' undefined could be used to tell perl to just read the whole thing. (Undefined is different from the null string, right?)
lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall) (01/23/90)
In article <Ckvp5d1@cs.psu.edu> schwartz@cs.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) writes: : Larry writes: : >$/ = "\0"; # line sep is something non-existent : : You know, I've always kind of disliked doing that. Suppose your file : contains all possible byte values 0..255? Something loses. Maybe doing : something like ``undef /;'' to make ``$/'' undefined could be used to : tell perl to just read the whole thing. (Undefined is different from : the null string, right?) Right, though the incantation would be "undef $/;". If you are in that situation, then it's easier just to say read(STDIN, $_, 1000000000); No doubt you'll now complain that you have a file larger than a gigabyte... :-) However, your idea has merit (in particular because the above won't read from <>). In fact, I just implemented it. Thanks. Larry