Passing variable to perl

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I need a non-perl (bash) way to strip the path from a list of "find" results. Below is the perl version which I could use, if I could figure out how to call the script with a variable (like in sh, $1 is the variable passed in ./script variable)

$file = "/path/to/file.txt";

# How do I reference an argument, like in bash:
$file = $1 # is wrong, how is it done in perl?

$dirname = $filename = $file;
$dirname =~ s!^(.*/)[^/]*$!\1!;
$filename =~ s!^.*/([^/]*)$!\1!;

print( "Directory path: $dirname\n" );
print( "Filename: $filename\n" );
2 
find . -print | \
while read file 
do
   basename $file
done
3

Thanks you, that works well.