Re: assign default value to variables I assign from split

John W. Krahn wrote:
>
>
>>        open FILE, "ls -tr | zcat -d $directory/$file |", or die qq/you 
>
> My version of zcat does not have a -d switch, what does it do on your 
> system?  It appears that "ls -tr | " in front of zcat is superfluous? 
> What do you think it will do there?
>
>
Just to follow up on this,

zcat -d option does below

[root@myserver ~]# zcat -?
zcat 1.3.5
(2002-09-30)
usage: zcat [-cdfhlLnNrtvV19] [-S suffix] [file ...]
 -c --stdout      write on standard output, keep original files unchanged
 -d --decompress  decompress