What is reading files (<> diamond operator) in Perl?

The diamond operator (<>), also known as the filehandle operator, is a special operator in Perl used for reading input from files or standard input. It provides a convenient way to process files line by line, making it particularly useful for text processing tasks.

When you use the diamond operator in your Perl script, it will read from the list of files provided as arguments to the script or from standard input if no files are specified. This operator automatically handles opening and closing the files for you.

Here's an example of using the diamond operator to read from a file:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; while (<>) { print "Line: $_"; }

Perl diamond operator filehandling line by line text processing