Writing and Appending to Files

Writing and Appending to Files

You can do more than just read a file of course. You can also open a filehandle for writing with the greater than sign (>) using the syntax:

open ([FILE_HANDLE_NAME], ">[filename]");

open ([FILE_HANDLE_NAME], ">>[filename]");

The difference between appending and writing is that when you write to a file, you erase whatever was previously there whereas when you append to a file, you simply add the new information to the end of whatever text was already there.

If the file that Perl is asked to write or append to does not already exist, Perl will create the file for you.

Typically, when writing to a file, you use the print function. However, instead of printing to standard output, you would specify the filename to print to. Consider the following example:

open (TEMP_FILE, ">temp.file") || 
      &CgiDie ("Cannot open temp.file");
print TEMP_FILE "hello there\n";
close (TEMP_FILE);

hello there

Reading a File Line by Line
Table of Contents
Deleting, Renaming and Changing the Permissions of Files