How to read command line arguments in Perl

Perl provides multiple ways to handle command line arguments, from simple to sophisticated:

use strict;
use warnings;

# Method 1: Using @ARGV directly (simple)
my $file = $ARGV[0] or die "Usage: $0 \n";
print "Processing: $file\n";

# Method 2: Using shift
my $input = shift @ARGV || 'default.txt';
my $output = shift @ARGV || 'output.txt';

# Method 3: Using Getopt::Long (recommended)
use Getopt::Long;

my $verbose = 0;
my $config = 'default.conf';
my @include;

GetOptions(
    'verbose|v+'  => \$verbose,
    'config|c=s'  => \$config,
    'include|I=s' => \@include,
) or die "Error in command line arguments\n";

print "Verbose level: $verbose\n";
print "Config: $config\n";
print "Includes: @include\n";

# Usage examples:
# perl script.pl -v -c myconfig.conf
# perl script.pl --verbose --include lib --include modules

Use Getopt::Long for any script that needs options. It handles both short (-v) and long (--verbose) options.