Combining arguments in a perl script

Here’s a trick that I learned recently that allows me to combine a string of arguments into a single variable. In my case, this was necessitated by a script that I was preparing to help analyze Windows file shares. In case you haven’t noticed, those Windows folks are still creating directories with blanks in their names. Sigh! I didn’t want to have to concern myself with putting quotes around the names of the shares that I was analyzing so that I could supply them as arguments.

The trick is to to use the join command as shown in the example below. This command joins pieces of text separated by blanks into a single $sharename variable. So now I can put the names of all the shares that I want to evaluate in a file, without worrying that some might contain blanks, and process them as a group.

if ( $#ARGV 

The join function does the reverse of the split command.  Where split takes a string and breaks it into pieces based on the character of your choosing,
join pulls them back together.  You might, for example, want to take a series of variables and pull them into a single string.

$string = join ( ':', $lastname, $firstname, $ID, $city, $state );


This will set the value of $string to something like "Doe:John:1234:Strasburg:VA".  Doing the same thing with the . operator would be quite a bit
messier:

$string = $lastname . ":" . $firstname . ":" . $ID . ":" . $city . ":" . %state;


You can use the join command to make a string out of the elements in any arbitrary array.  The @ARGV reference is, after all, the array that contains
the arguments passed to the script.  If you prefer to not insert a separator between the array elements when they're combined into a string, use a null
string as shown below.

$string = join ( '', @array );


Both uses of the join command can be useful, especially when you need to insert delimiters between your pieces of text.