By using perl as a scripting language instead of a “traditional” shell, you can use much more C-like syntax without sacrificing functionality.

Example Script: Filament Counter The above script doesn’t yet modify the G-code, so let’s write one that actually does something.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed ...

Basically, use <B>open</B> to create a filehandle (in the appropriate mode -- e.g. read, write, append, whatever) and then pass that as the first argument to printf, then close the filehandle.