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Understanding streams and files

Understanding streams and files - Perl Tutorial

From the course: Perl 5 Essential Training

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Understanding streams and files

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- [Voiceover] When we think of a file, we tend to think of a block of data on some kind of media: a hard drive or a memory card, or some fixed physical media. Most operating systems deal with a file as a stream of data, rather than blocks of data. This allows the system to buffer the data, and to provide it to client processes in manageable chunks. This also allows a system to treat many different data sources in the same way. So a stream may be data read from, or written to a file in the file system, the network, or even the screen and keyboard. In Perl, like most modern languages, a file may be any number of things, and Perl handles these various data sources in similar ways, often indistinguishably so. For the sake of simplicity, all of these things are typically referred to as files. While there are different things, and they have different properties, from the perspective of your code, they work in pretty much the same way. So I tend to use the term file to refer to them, unless…

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