Perl::Critic::Policy::InputOutput::ProhibitExplicitStdin3pm

Affiliation

This Policy is part of the core Perl::Critic distribution.

Overview

Perl has a useful magic filehandle called *ARGV that checks the command line and if there are any arguments, opens and reads those as files. If there are no arguments, *ARGV behaves like *STDIN instead. This behavior is almost always what you want if you want to create a program that reads from "STDIN". This is often written in one of the following two equivalent forms:

  while (<ARGV>) {
    # ... do something with each input line ...
  }
  # or, equivalently:
  while (<>) {
    # ... do something with each input line ...
  }

If you want to prompt for user input, try special purpose modules like IO::Prompt.

Configuration

This Policy is not configurable except for the standard options.

Caveats

Due to a bug in the current version of PPI (v1.119_03) and earlier, the readline operator is often misinterpreted as less-than and greater-than operators after a comma. Therefore, this policy misses important cases like

  my $content = join '', <STDIN>;

because it interprets that line as the nonsensical statement:

  my $content = join '', < STDIN >;

When that PPI bug is fixed, this policy should start catching those violations automatically.

Credits

Initial development of this policy was supported by a grant from the Perl Foundation.