Little Acts of Magic

Randal L. Schwartz

So, let's start with some text manipulation. I have a poem written by a good friend of mine, Peg Edera, in a file named peg_poem, as follows:

The Little Acts

Maybe there is no magic.
Maybe it is only faith.
The lonely girl stuffs a letter
In a bottle, casts it in the sea.
It floats, it sinks.
What counts is that it's cast.

Those little intentions,
The petals placed on the altar,
The prayer whispered into air,
The deep breath.
The little acts,
The candles lit,
The incense burning
And we remember what counts
And we know what we need
In the little acts.

Then is when to listen.
What is it that brought you
To this?
There's the magic.
Right in hearing what
Sends you to
Hope.

Peg Edera
February 8, 2000

The title of her poem inspired the theme of this column, so it's only appropriate that we use the text as grist for the mill.

Let's start with the basics of opening the file and reading. That'd be something like:

  open POEM, "peg_poem" or die "Cannot open: $!";
  while (<POEM>) {
    ... do something here with each line
  }

If we just want to copy the data to STDOUT, a simple print will do:

  # open..