Perl read line by line

Question

I have a simple Perl script to read a file line by line. Code is below. I want to display two lines and break the loop. But it doesn\'t work. Where is the bug?

Answer 1

With these types of complex programs, it's better to let Perl generate the Perl code for you:

$ perl -MO=Deparse -pe'exit if $.>2'

Which will gladly tell you the answer,

LINE: while (defined($_ = )) {
    exit if $. > 2;
}
continue {
    die "-p destination: $!\n" unless print $_;
}

Alternatively, you can simply run it as such from the command line,

$ perl -pe'exit if$.>2' file.txt