Perl Interview Questions Part 8

Q:How do I read command-line arguments with Perl?

A:With Perl, command-line arguments are stored in the array named @ARGV.
$ARGV[0] contains the first argument, $ARGV[1] contains the second argument, etc.
$#ARGV is the subscript of the last element of the @ARGV array, so the number of arguments on the command line is $#ARGV + 1.
Here’s a simple program:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$numArgs = $#ARGV + 1;
print “thanks, you gave me $numArgs command-line arguments.\n”;
foreach $argnum (0 .. $#ARGV) {
print “$ARGV[$argnum]\n”;
}

Q:When would `local $_’ in a function ruin your day?
A:When your caller was in the middle for a while(m//g) loop
The /g state on a global variable is not protected by running local on it. That’ll teach you to stop using locals. Too bad $_ can’t be the target of a my() — yet.

Q:What happens to objects lost in “unreachable” memory, such as the object returned by Ob->new() in `{ my $ap; $ap = [ Ob->new(), \$ap ]; }’ ?
A :Their destructors are called when that interpreter thread shuts down.
When the interpreter exits, it first does an exhaustive search looking for anything that it allocated. This allows Perl to be used in embedded and multithreaded applications safely, and furthermore guarantees correctness of object code.

Q:How do I print the entire contents of an array with Perl?
A :To answer this question, we first need a sample array. Let’s assume that you have an array that contains the name of baseball teams, like this:
@teams = (‘cubs’, ‘reds’, ‘yankees’, ‘dodgers’);
If you just want to print the array with the array members separated by blank spaces, you can just print the array like this:
@teams = (‘cubs’, ‘reds’, ‘yankees’, ‘dodgers’);
print “@teams\n”;
But that’s not usually the case. More often, you want each element printed on a separate line. To achieve this, you can use this code:
@teams = (‘cubs’, ‘reds’, ‘yankees’, ‘dodgers’);
foreach (@teams) {
print “$_\n”;
}