1.5 Reading From the Terminal

Now, we now learn how to read user input from the terminal. In Perl, the terminal is designated as the standard input or STDIN. In computer terminology, the terminal is called a stream because that is where a stream of characters or lines are input or output by the computer. Perl calls such things filehandles. Perl encloses a filehandle or stream inside angle brackets (i.e., < and >) when it is used for reading purposes. <STDIN> reads the next line of input from the terminal when used in a situation where a scalar is expected.