Perl Programming/Keywords/read

The read keyword

read is a function that attempts to read LENGTH characters of data into variable SCALAR from the specified FILEHANDLE. If OFFSET is specified, it skips the number of OFFSET characters. It returns the number of characters actually read. If the end of file is reached, 0 is returned. On an error undef is returned and $! is also set.

read is unfortunately not the opposite of write.

Syntax

  read FILEHANDLE, SCALAR, LENGTH, OFFSET
  read FILEHANDLE, SCALAR, LENGTH

See also

• sysread
• write