Do not use diamond for STDIN

Besides the points made in Re: Loop Control : REDO, you should never use the diamond with interactive I/O like prompting. Use <STDIN> instead. Otherwise, your day will be very miserable when someone types a filename on the command line. You'll still get all those prompts, and it'll look very funky.

As an alternative, say print ... if $ARGV eq '-', then you'll only be prompting if you're actually reading from STDIN. The output-only results printing can be unconditional.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on Do not use diamond for STDIN Select or Download Code

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Re: Do not use diamond for STDIN by Fatty Lumpkin (Acolyte) on Oct 29, 2001 at 20:48 UTC
Sir, It seems like this may be a very desireable action at times. EG. in the case where you want a script to be interactive, but also have it cronned with all of the values for it in another file. In which case <> will do exactly what you want in both cases. Isn't this more a question of style that what SHOULD/SHOULDN'T be done? -Fatty Lumpkin Update: Merlyn is 1000% correct, poor reading on my part, i missed the actual printed prompt.I am just used to doing something like `shift \|\| (print "\nprompt:" and <>);` [download] But that doesn't allow for this behavior either.I missed the point, Thanks for correcting me.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Do not use diamond for STDIN by merlyn (Sage) on Oct 29, 2001 at 23:52 UTC
It seems like this may be a very desireable action at times. EG. in the case where you want a script to be interactive, but also have it cronned with all of the values for it in another file. In which case <> will do exactly what you want in both cases. In which case, you don't want to prompt, because then you get a bunch of prompts in the output, without responses. That... looks... tacky. I'd fatal that in a code review. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]


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