What does -p STDIN mean in Perl?

Question

I came across this code

 if (-p STDIN) {
        while (<STDIN>) { ... }
 }

What does the conditional -p STDIN means? There are other like -p ?

Answer 1

It's a file test operator. Here's the full list from perldoc :

-r  File is readable by effective uid/gid.
-w  File is writable by effective uid/gid.
-x  File is executable by effective uid/gid.
-o  File is owned by effective uid.

-R  File is readable by real uid/gid.
-W  File is writable by real uid/gid.
-X  File is executable by real uid/gid.
-O  File is owned by real uid.

-e  File exists.
-z  File has zero size (is empty).
-s  File has nonzero size (returns size in bytes).

-f  File is a plain file.
-d  File is a directory.
-l  File is a symbolic link (false if symlinks aren't supported by the file system).
-p  File is a named pipe (FIFO), or Filehandle is a pipe.
-S  File is a socket.
-b  File is a block special file.
-c  File is a character special file.
-t  Filehandle is opened to a tty.

-u  File has setuid bit set.
-g  File has setgid bit set.
-k  File has sticky bit set.

-T  File is an ASCII or UTF-8 text file (heuristic guess).
-B  File is a "binary" file (opposite of -T).

-M  Script start time minus file modification time, in days.
-A  Same for access time.
-C  Same for inode change time (Unix, may differ for other platforms)

So -p checks to see if the filehandle (in this case, STDIN ) is attached to a named pipe.