How to use "say" in Perl onelines without declaring 'use v5.11' or similar?

Question

In newer Perls there is "say" command that behaves like println:

$ perl -e 'use v5.11; say "qqq"'
qqq

but it's a bit cumbersome to use in oneliners, as one needs to declare version...

$ perl -e 'say "qqq"'
String found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "say "qqq""

$ perl -e 'print "qqq\n"'
qqq # but \n is easy for forget and "print" is longer...

Is there a way to enable say without adding slashes (there can already by plenty of in the line) or moving cursor left to type use v5.11 in command line?

Answer 1

If calling perl from the command line, you can use the -E flag

• -E program: like -e, but enables all optional features

As demonstrated:

$ perl -E 'say "qqq"'
qqq

Answer 2

As an option to -E, I use -l, which makes print work like say (add a newline). I use this most of the time myself, and I find that it completely replaces say.

$ perl -lwe'print "foo"'
foo

What it really does is set $\ to the current value of $/, which causes the oddity that the command line option -0 affects -l, which is something to look out for. The order of the switches matter, so that

$ perl -l -00 -e'print "hi"'

works as expected, but

$ perl -00 -l -e'print "hi"'

Does not (it sets $\ to "\n\n", for paragraph mode).

This latter case is practical when using paragraph mode, for re-printing the paragraphs easily. All in all, there are many benefits to using -l.

Technically, print is longer than say, but my fingers already type print automatically, and print is in the actual case shorter than print^H^H^H^H^Hsay.. (backspace that is)