To get the content of a file, use the slurp built-in function, which reads the whole file and returns a string.
say slurp "file.txt";
The function that does the opposite is called spurt, it writes the string to a file.
Let us implement the Unix’s cp command in Perl 6.
my ($source, $dest) = @*ARGS; my $data = slurp $source; spurt $dest, $data;
By default, either a new destination file will be created or rewritten if it already exists. You can open the file in the append mode by adding the :append value in the third argument:
spurt $dest, $data, :append;
Another mode, :createonly, generates an error if the file exists.
spurt $dest, $data, :createonly;
Both slurp and spurt accept an argument with the encoding name:
my ($source, $dest) = @*ARGS; my $data = slurp $source, enc => 'UTF-8'; spurt $dest, $data, enc => 'UTF-16';
The Str class inherits (from the Cool class) the IO method that returns an object of the IO::Path class. It contains some useful information about the file.
For example, this is how you can get the absolute path to a local file:
say 'file.txt'.IO.abspath;
The IO.dir method prints the content of a directory:
say '.'.IO.dir;
The IO.extension method returns an extension of a file:
say $filename.IO.extension; say $filename.IO.extension;
Finally, there are one-letter named methods for making checks of the file’s or directory’s existence or checking its properties:
say 1 if 'file.txt'.IO.e; # same as -e 'file.txt' in Perl 5 (file exists) say 1 if 'file.txt'.IO.f; # -f (is a file) say 1 if '..'.IO.d; # -d (is a directory)