How to read STDIN into a variable in perl

Question

I want to read from STDIN and have everything in a variable, how can I do this?

Answer 1

This is probably not the most definitive way:

my $stdin = join("", <STDIN>);

Or you can enable slurp mode and get the whole file in one go:

local $/;
my $stdin = <STDIN>;

[but see man perlvar for caveats about making global changes to special variables]

If instead of a scalar you want an array with one element per line:

my @stdin = <STDIN>;

Answer 2

my $var = do { local $/; <> };

This doesn't quite read Stdin, it also allows files to specify on the command line for processing (like sed or grep).

This does include line feeds.