Using both ARGV and CGI in a Perl script

Question

I am writing a Perl script that can run both from command line and from a web page. The script receives a couple of parameters and it reads those parameters through $ARGV if it started from command line and from CGI if it started from a web page. How can I do that?

my $username;
my $cgi = new CGI;
#IF CGI
$username = $cgi->param('username');
#IF COMMAND LINE
$username = $ARGV[0];

Answer 1

With CGI.pm you can pass params on the command line with no need to change your code. Quoting the docs:

If you are running the script from the command line or in the perl debugger, you can pass the script a list of keywords or parameter=value pairs on the command line or from standard input (you don't have to worry about tricking your script into reading from environment variables)

Wrt your example, it's a matter of doing:

perl script.cgi username=John