Intrepid

about this image:

This is a visual fingerprint (a "visprint" as it's called) — an image generated using fractal maths — representing my GnuPG key fingerprint (postprocessed in ImageMagick).

Welcome to the home node of The Unreasonable Man! He goes by Soren, Sorentino, "somian", "amphibole", Soren Andersen)

Other Favorite Quotes

"[André Malraux said] Do what you believe you must and leave the interpreting of it to others."
"[This] seemed to me to summarize his personal philosophy. How true this is. Don't be distracted by the carping of bystanders, their irresponsible attitudes, their self-serving, cowardly words and actions."
— Daisaku Ikeda on a dialog with André Malraux

A little quote about religious tolerance, which I see as pertaining to the tendency of some Christians to shout "Persecution!" rather often nowadays:

"We respect the right of everyone to believe whatever they like. ... But there are two important limits to religious tolerance. First, I have no right to legal protection against your scepticism, criticism or ridicule. Religion is too powerful a force, and is too often a cause of injustice or evil, for it to be immune from discussion and debate."
— David Pannick QC

“Perl is the portable distillation of the UNIX philosophy."
— Scott McMahan

"Write documentation as if whoever reads it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
—Steve English, as quoted by Peter Langston

You can disagree with my views about Perlmonks, surely,

"... people who condemn others simply on the basis that the target of condemnation is "angry" or "frustrated" are using a false premise as a basis for their condemnation. Anger is not, by itself, a transgression against society, or the Monastery."

What else is on this node? [an erratic, partial TOC]
I use multiple Operating System / Platforms and therefore several different ports of Perl.	last update `28 Dec 2011`
Interesting CPAN modules: stuff I want to check out when I find the time.
"Tricky" for me to remember how to use: An assortment of Perl topics that I need to look up excessively often.	last update `02 Mar 2005`
My GPG public key
Our Solemn Intonement -- something to be mindful of.
Some things are more important than Perl: a short rant.	last update `08 Aug 2004`
The syntax-highlighted rendition of a snippet offered in Perl Monks' Meditations.	last update `04 Jul 2004`
Shell s‎crip‎ting in service of Perl: download and view PM nodecode.	last update `07 Aug 2003`
Terribly kewl CSS scheme for Perl Monks.	last update `02 Sep 2004`

You will see formatting oddities on this node. These show as visible HTML formatting tags. The reason is not carelessness; instead, after this node was created, the parser for Perlmonks nodes changed such that style=... in tags is no longer accepted.

A short rant

One thing that I've noticed in my time spent chatting in the cb here at Perlmonks is that the level of ethical sophistication amongst a few of my fellow cb'ers can be terribly low. I make this generalization because there's one prime point of all ethical systems that I can feel any respect for, and that is:

Both these exert their influence generally (not always) to the detraction of good in the lives of human beings, to the enhancement of evil. People seem to regard the exercize of power by individuals like irc ops as some form of divine right, which is fine as long as such people who think this way don't try to pass themselves off as freedom-loving people. Furthermore: there seems to be a general assumption that if a person has contrary views to an irc #channel-op or a Perlmonks God, they are automatically wrong. This is childish, immature, dangerous and pathetic.

Just as bad is the pattern wherein supposedly intelligent people automatically assume that the person saying a new thing that insults (in their view) or challenges a comfortable dogma, or other item of "social consensus," is automatically wrong.

The only positive change that has ever taken place in the world has come about because of alienated, despised malcontents who dared to speak truth to power. The only kind of human being truly worth honoring is one who can summon the personal courage to speak truth to power, on whatever level or in whatever form it takes (embodied as either the despot or the mob). No-one lives a worthwhile life without ever falling afoul of some embodiment of power, sometime during their lives. The rest of humanity live like sheep, and no society that deserves to be remembered by history erects monuments of honor to sheep.

When a person gets banned in irc or otherwise "punished" somehow in any kind of hacker social context, they fairly often deserve it because their actions have been contrary to the general good of the group. But not always. This distinction between "always" and "not always" is the difference between the destruction of the world and its salvation. It is everything. Not understanding this is the distinction between an ignorant person and a real citizen, whether of the Happy Realm of Hacking Free Software or of the World.

The use of the term "Troll" on Perlmonks by a certain group of people is an example of something like what's described above. It reflects not on the accused person but on the accusers, who are misusing a type of peer group -based power (being the Despotic Mob) to exercize coercion against someone whose aims are, as many others see, not those of a troll at all. The very best that can be said of such misuse is that the accusers are engaging in reckless and irresponsible speculation. The worst is that they themselves are far more despicable than any "Internet Troll", that they are in fact aiming to give themselves the twisted pleasure of seeing their group power effectively deny another participant the option of continuing to engage in a reasonable relationship with the site, community or project in question.

One can only feel pity for people living with the kind of impoverished inner lives and distorted emotional personalities that would derive pleasure from such a thing, but unfortunately the modern world at least, with its intense pressures and demands, often gives rise to such it seems.

I don't see posts by Anonymous Monk beginning at 6:30pm on 7 Dec 2005, by using CSS to override display settings. The texts of postings of any nature by any non-existing (Anonymous) Monk are invisible for me. This is a measure that I've taken until such time as the preferred solution comes to pass (the preferred solution being: the Perlmonks site no longer allows Anonymous posting at all).

A side note: The application at cb60 is the only cb history interface that is currently working (to my knowledge) at the time of this writing, and is the only one that can be configured to ignore users as the live chatterbox can.

There's a particularly annoying kind of conduct that very frequently takes place and lands users who commit it on the following list. This consists of coming into the chatterbox with a minimal but strange-sounding question - one that rings "warning bells" for some of the experienced Perl users. When it is suggested that more information is needed because the approach seems dubious (perhaps based on a mistaken understanding of how something in Perl works), such an individual committing this type of annoyance then leaves in a huff, saying something like Thanks for the kind help in a sarcastic and injured way that is intended to cause guilt feelings.

This is playing the "Newbie Victim of Mean Monks" card, and it is not only stupid, and not only pathetic, but also wrong - because the chatterbox or Perlmonks in general is a place where many give of their time to try to help less experienced Perlers. These volunteers don't need to put up with that kind of childishness, the attempted emotional manipulation and tantrums; and in my opinion, should not put up with it.

Again, it is (in my opinion), really ok to insist on minimum standards of mature behavior in order to qualify for help or attention at Perlmonks.

Perl Tips, Observations, and Experiments

I use both Free Software Operating Systems and the proprietary Microsoft Windows OSes.

Obviously I prefer to spend more time on the former (my favorites are Ubuntu and its parent distribution, Debian). On MS Windows I use both ActivePerl and the new Win32 Perl that's being called StrawberryPerl. I often build my own Perl installations from source, as well.

The quality of the user experience one has with the MS Windwoes OSes is highly variable. Some users find little lacking in it and some are driven crazy by it. One inclination that is not well-served by Microsoft is the desire to use the CLI (Command-Line Interface, but if you are here reading, you knew that ;-) …and so I rely on the long-lived and community-supported Cygwin environment (this is important: Cygwin is supported by volunteers; do not act like a petulant spoiled brat if you go asking for support {if you happen to try Cygwin out}; if you do, you will just be ignored). Cygwin provides a port of Perl that tracks the major release cycle of mainstream Perl and "acts like" Perl running on a unix OS platform. Cygwin also provides the Bash shell and many other GNU userspace components that are common to all GNU/Linux and other free unix OSes.

Because I have acquired years of experience using Perl on MS Windwoes, I do not have the oblivious outlook about file name extentions that is customary from users who do only work on unix platforms. My decision is to name Perl programs with a .plx extention which disambiguates these files from those containing Perl library code. I use the appropriate MS Windows commands (from the CMD.exe cli) to create the right Registry settings so that the files named with .plx extentions are associated with the perl executable.

A smattering of Useful Tips for PerlMonks, especially new ones

Link types at PM (because I tend to forget :-):

Monks Solemn Intonement:

n.y.p.m.blue

This list is of modules that I'm not currently using for anything but that I think I might want to at some future time

A little parts bin of useful HTML entities for doing PM node markup

How I am creating ordinary paragraphs for Perlmonks node writeups these days:

This should work fine in a MS Windows CMD shell too, with the alterations that (a) all single quotes around the -e s‎crip‎t and perl flags are changed to double quotes, and (b) the line-continuation backslash/newlines are removed.

·Assorted Perl Stuff, and platform-specific notes·

Which and where is “Some::Perl::Module”
(finding VERSION and location of a Perl module):

Preface:

Depending on your OS and your work habits / preferences, you might want to use a Unix sh means of wrapping the Perl code implementing this technique (second thing below), or you might need a MS Windows console helper (in the form of a DOSKEY macro, shown immediately below). I've named this critter different things in different manifestations on different machines at different times ... but now I am aiming to settle on it being named PMTEST.

Sorry, those long (wrapped) ugly pieces of code are what's required for MS Windows CMD shell. The command interpreter does not offer any means (that I have discovered) of using continuing statements on multiple lines when defining a DOSKEY macro. Don't try a COPY-PASTE of the above, either, or you'll have to figure out how to remove every introduced newline inside the macro definition before the code will work. Trust me, you won't feel good about the wasted time.

To use the above code, you must place it in a *.bat or *.cmd file and then "execute" it from the MS Windows console (the commandline interface, CLI, CMD.exe).

Invoke the macro (not the .bat file it was saved in, which you execute only once per each shell session or instance) with a single arg, the Perl-style name of a module (for ex. “pmtest CGI” or “pmtest File::Find”).

Here's the Unix shell (bash/ksh etc.) rendition of the pmtest thing

This also needs to be "gotten into" the bash session somehow. Ths canonical way of doing so is to include the above in a shell initialization file like ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc.

For contemplation by people who want to write software installers, Perl installation administrators, etc.:

In contrast with Unix-like platforms, MS Windows has it's own sense of Well-known Folders (not absolute filesystem "folders" but instead pointers to locations which can reasonably be expected to exist on most Windows machines, with some divergence between the bog-ordinary Workstation and the more complex Server kind of Windows installation).

These are abstractions, meta-directories if you like, which exist above the level of the actual filesystem and happen to be represented in the typical, default Windows ENV by variables like %APPDATA% and %ProgramFiles% and %ALLUSERSPROFILE%.

We can access the values assigned to these meta-directories using the API calls wrapped in the Win32.pm module (not in the core namespace which is automatically built in when Perl is created for a Windows system; the user has to explicitly say use Win32; in order to make this work).

Here's a way to get the location of the meta-directory of your choice, assuming that you choose with some clue to begin with ;-/ ... :

Note also that the above commandlines aren't broken up in actual use, and will have to be mended by any who wish to try it out. ~~MS Windows CMD shell doesn't allow multi-line commands even inside quotes~~ UPDATE: You can create multi-line Perl one-liner (console input) s‎crip‎ts in the interactive Windows CMD shell. You will escape the newline with the ^ character (caret) but this does not work to span lines inside quotes. Instead, you will use -e repeatedly, just as you may do in a *nix sh-type shell. Here's the oneline demo above, thanks to pKai who educated me on this!:

Here's a DOSKEY macro-ized version of the code above. Handy for interactive CMD shell use where you need to quickly check the list of Special Folders (or a particular group of them).

·For MSWin -using Monks·

·For EveryMonk· (any platform)

Investigate the modules and libraries your Perl installation has access to:

Need Help Using CPAN Effectively?

Documentation for the current version of PPM (3), the crufty thingy that many MSwin users rely on to install new packaged Perl modules:
ppm3 Documentation
You can easily break your PPM v3 unknowingly merely by updating `Text::Autoformat` – see Bug Listing
PPD file format – appears to have not been updated since the 5.6 series releases at ActiveState. Please note that it makes no mention whatsoever of a parameter or field named `ARCHITECTURE NAME` then go and in contrast look at some example .PPD files from the various repositories. Note Added: This seems to be explained by this brief excerpt from the ppm Mailing List, authored by Jan Dubois: "Since Perl 5.6 and Perl 5.8 are not binary compatible, we started appending the Perl version number to the architecture string in ActivePerl 5.8. Try this: <ARCHITECTURE NAME="MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-5.8" /> Both ppm2 and ppm3 in ActivePerl 8xx have been patched to use these architecture names."
A (perhaps) little-known, rich PPM repository to add to your list that ppm searches.
For Perl5.8 you may check status of ActiveState's builds of packages (modules).

The dmake utility:
The recommended tool for building Perl from the source kit using a Free C/C++ compiler (MinGW), is dmake. This variant of the classic make tool is now maintained by OpenOffice.org folks ("tools" Project) and the dmake manpage is online. dmake on CPAN: is now maintained by Steve Hay and is no longer the extremely old code offered years ago by Gurusamy Sarathy. Steve is building it using MSVC++ from the OO.org source mentioned above.

Preflight-check for CPAN.pm mirrors (using system `ping(1)'):

Find your system's master list of CPAN mirror sites, maybe freshen it up:

Wrap the code above in a function in your shell initfile if you are a bash user and you like to have such conveniences at your "fingertips", as I do:

Easy way to see that s‎crip‎t output gets a terminating newline automatically:

In s‎crip‎ts:

In one-liners (s‎crip‎t is "-e"):

Filter newlines out of systems call results

%hash = ( key => grep [ chomp ], `which ps` ); which does the same things as: %hash = ( key => grep {chomp || 1} `which ps` );

Attribution: seen on comp.lang.perl.misc in msgid <3F447BDB.9928761A@acm.org>.

Slurp an entire file in

Another way to do this, faster and better:

Something that may be called "The Bartian Transposition" someday:

Where's my HOME???

Something really special:

Opcode scanning for Safe.pm

Dump a string of opcode names that can be fed to Safe::new->permit. Based on knowledge / shell elan shared by ysth.

Created 30 Jul 2003 EDT (GMT+4):
Updated Thu Jul 31 2003
Updated Sun Jul 04 2004
Regarding the Meditation on List Cleanup

The goal is to eliminate duplicates without disturbing existing ordered-ness. Thus the property of mundane hash assignment such that duplicates disappear is not sufficient by itself, but in a combination demonstrated in this code below, the truth-ness of a hash value can be used to prevent duplicate array entries.

#! /usr/bin/env perl
# "uniqnord" - remove dups from a list of identifiers.
use strict; use warnings;

$, = ! -t STDOUT ? "\n" : " " ;
my %seen = (); $\ = "\n";
print STDOUT  join($, =>
    grep {!$seen{$_}++} map {
      if (/ +/) { $/=" " ; @_=split }
        else    { chomp ; $_ }} <>)
__END__

The real code:

#! /usr/bin/env perl
# "uniqnord" - remove dups from a list of identifiers.
use strict; use warnings;

$, = ! -t STDOUT ? "\n" : " " ;
my %seen = (); $\ = "\n";
print STDOUT  join($, =>
    grep {!$seen{$_}++} map {
      if (/ +/) { $/=" " ; @_=split }
        else    { chomp ; $_ }} <>)
__END__
[download]

Posts by Intrepid

EU::MM, StrawberryPerl, Gnu make ... in Meditations
3 direct replies — Read more / Contribute by Intrepid
on Oct 26, 2008 at 16:31

I want it the way I want it.

I got around to trying my own suggestion for altering the Config for StrawberryPerl in the manner I proposed, in the discussion over here, recently. I had said:

So a superior approach might be to set cc in the Perl Config-heavy.pl file to the fully-qualified pathname where the mingw gcc that's shipped with Strawberry is installed. That way the right gcc is always called:

Config_heavy.pl: cc='gcc'
becomes: cc='C:/strawberry/c/bin/gcc'

Strawberry's setup program alters the MSWindows system PATH (%Path%) env var but that's inherently fragile when something later (like a brain-damaged user or other software setup program) could come along and clobber that.

The results thus far have not been ok. The error seen pertains to how EU::MM is deciding what the semantics for invoking the link step of extention library file creation ought to be... see Link: extracted snippet from the Makefile generated by ExtUtils::MakeMaker on Strawberry, showing how it tells make to direct the compilation of the extention lib (in this case, for the extension module List::MoreUtils).

Those familiar with the technicalities of the GNU ld linker and how gcc syntax for its invocation works will recognize that -out: and -def: are completely unGNUish and in fact are the parameter syntax for the Microsoft linker.

This is drearily familiar because this is what using Perl the way I want to on MS Windows has always been like. Things often "almost work" but not quite. In this case what I believe is happening is that somewhere in the depths of the MakeMaker apparatus, somebody coded a fragile, over-simplified test for the Config value of cc; and if it is not just plain gcc in Config, the apparatus decides that 'that other compiler' (Microsoft's cl.exe) must be the one available. I am surely going to check that out and see if I'm right ...

Ok, checked, and it's the line in ExtUtils::MM_Win32 that does
my $GCC = $Config{'cc'} =~ /^gcc/i ? 1 : 0;
that is responsible for this badness. That was a piece of coding lacking in foresight if ever I have seen one. How about a more reasonable, reliable, flexible
my $GCC = ($Config{'cc'} =~ /^gcc/i or $Config{'cc'} =~ /gcc(?:\.exe)?$/i) ? 1 : 0;
instead?

It is such a bummer that the way adding modules on MS Windows works, is based on these contortions deemed necessary for the historical MS Studio tools etc, then awkwardly twisted back to the GNU toolset provided by the MinGW project. MinGW GCC + friends are basically the familiar *nix tools and work so very similarly, yet where Perl is concerned MinGW's gcc is some half-known mystery that can barely be dealt with. Apparently that's 'OK' because the main port of Perl to MS Windows is fashioned in such a way as to build and interoperate mainly with the Microsoft proprietary development system ;-/.

What I am truly wishing for is a way to override ExtUtils::MM_Unix code with MinGW-compatible syntax only instead of going anywhere near that damn ExtUtils::MM_Win32 module. ;-/

The other thing I am most wishing for from Strawberry and similar Win32 perls is that the GNU make tool can be chosen to build CPAN modules, instead of the dmake program. I know GNU make inside and out and use it for building all my other software. It's apparently still a notion out there that "GNU make on Windows as MinGW provides it, isn't working well enough to build Perl modules"; but MinGW's build of GNU make now reflects steady improvement and is perfectly up to that task. And it's bundled as part of the MinGW included in StrawberryPerl.

Node Updates
27 Oct 2008 UTC	Wanted to mention Link: ExtUtils::MM_Win32's method for creating the link step make recipe (sub `dynamic_link`) …for deeper meditations.

Two in the box, ready to go!
We be fast and they be slow!

— GhostBusters II

Soren Andersen / “somian” / “perlspinr”

UnBefuzzling XML::Parser: an adventure with EU::MM method overrides in Meditations
3 direct replies — Read more / Contribute by Intrepid
on Jan 16, 2008 at 06:29

First things first

The code is the major thing. The code is what the reader should try running* and try reading in order to understand the issues that I've addressed. The following links are current as of Wed Jan 16 11:08:42 UTC 2008 and point to different kinds of archives of the same source code kit, a tarball and a zipfile:

beta 04, .tar.gz
beta 04, .zip

Please check the website containing directory first for more recent updates before downloading the files above, would be my advice.

* Try running $ perl Makefile.PL verbose — use the verbose flag.

Required Reading

The CPAN module Request Tracker (RT) ticket connected to this coding effort is bug 32123.

Background on ExtUtils::MakeMaker

Documentation for the release of EUMM's `MM_Unix.pm` current as of this writing: ExtUtils/MM_Unix.pm

In all that follows, EUMM (a.k.a EU::MM) is used as a widely-known abbreviation for the ExtUtils::MakeMaker namespace and its sub-modules.

The notion at work in EUMM is code generation, where the type of "code" being emitted is the declarative syntax understood by `make'. The job of creating a Makefile was divided up into discreet methods, each of which would be responsible for a single section of the final Makefile. When "overrides" are mentioned, I am referring to the fact that about 60% of the methods for producing sections of Makefile were designed to be "overridden" so that special-case platforms (like ms windows) could be accommodated, or other special case scenarios could be achieved. The default methods live, appropriately, in the namespace ExtUtils::MM_Unix; this could be seen as "appropriate" since Unix is where Perl was born, and is such a (in many ways) standardized and widely-deployed family of OSes (as the famous footnote in the Camel puts it: "Assuming that you agree that Unix is both standard and fashionable" ;-).

In the ExtUtils/MM_Unix.pm module documentation mentioned above, a symbol (o) next to the name of the method is used to indicate that the method is one of the overridable ones. Methods lacking this mark do not have the automatic support for overriding; they were assumed to be doing parts of the Makefile text that would be invariant.

ExtUtils::MakeMaker Issues Addressed in this Work

Future elaboration

There might be more discussion of this patch later. At the time that I started writing this meditation I was not interested enough in teaching anyone anything due to the fatigue I'm experiencing after combining the coding effort with the effort to stay in touch with some of the other Perl authors involved. Such efforts included trying to contact a certain person at a known hangout (#p5p at irc - perl -org) and encountering the borderline psychosis so common among the current set of p5p personalities ... so please vote according to your displeasure at not finding more content here or at having the social club you identify with being insulted (or at neither of the above).

Soren A / somian / perlspinr / Intrepid

--

Words can be slippery, so consider carefully who speaks as well as what is said; know as much as you can about the total context of the speaker's participation in a forum over time, before deciding that you fully comprehend the intention behind those words. If in doubt, ask for clarification before you 'flame'.

rightway from US.pm in Cool Uses for Perl
No replies — Read more | Post response by Intrepid
on Oct 25, 2006 at 10:02

Let it be more convenient to use the 3rd-party unix-like sh shells with/from Win32-ish Perls.

This code is written as a module so that it is convenient to use from the command line. See the SYNOPSIS section in the embedded POD, below.

package US;
use strict;
use warnings;
use vars qw($VERSION @ISA @EXPORT);
sub rightway;

$VERSION ='0.01';
use base 'Exporter';
@EXPORT  = ('rightway');

=head1 NAME

US.pm - correct slash orientation in file path specs from native Win32
+ to Perl-canonical form.

=head1 VERSION

This documentation describes version B<0.01> of US.

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  use US;
  use Win32;
  use File::Glob 'bsd_glob';
  {
      local $\ = "\n";
      print for glob(
         rightway Win32::GetShortPathName(Win32::GetFolderPath(Win32::
+CSIDL_COMMON_DOCUMENTS))
       . "/*") ;
  }

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Makes it more convenient to use the 3rd-party unix-like sh shells with
+/from Win32-ish Perls.

"US" as a name was not chosen with a nationalistic or xenophobic inten
+tion. The author
expects to use this code mainly from the commandline (in "1-liners" as
+ we say in Perl),
and as such a short, easy to remember name is a matter of convenience.
+ Ok? "U"=="Unix",
"S"=="Slash". Thus, "US.pm".

=cut

=head1 EXPORTED FUNCTIONS

=head2 rightway

=cut

sub rightway ($) {
    my $pstr = shift @_;
    $pstr=~ s{\\}{/}g;
    $pstr;
}


1; # US like all modules, should return "TRUE".
__END__

=head1 AUTHOR, WARRANTY, COPYRIGHT, & LICENCE INFO

NO COPYRIGHT, NO WARRANTY, USE AT OWN RISK.
Created Oct 25 2006 by Soren Andersen. This code is considered by the
author to be so obvious and trivial that he hereby releases all claim
of rights to (and disclaims any responsibility for) the code, and
places it in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

 Last modified: 25 Oct 2006 at 09:31 AM EDT

=cut
[download]

METAreqWeb - overview of CPAN dist prerequisites in Cool Uses for Perl
2 direct replies — Read more / Contribute by Intrepid
on Oct 10, 2006 at 12:26

Solution to a chatterbox FAQ: what modules required are shipped with Perl? Which are already on the system?

This cli script sits at the corner of my desk awaiting the next time I am looking up Perl modules at search.cpan.org.

Finding the module I am interested in, I examine its directory (like: http://search.cpan.org/~moconnor/YAML-AppConfig-0.16/ ) ... there are a number of files listed, including Makefile.PL (or Build.PL), MANIFEST, README, and ...META.yml.

I context-click on the META.yml file and click "Copy Link Location" to put the URL pointing to the META.yml file on the system clipboard. Then I run the snippet below to quickly get the overview of this module's prerequisites.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# Last modified: 10 Oct 2006 at 12:02 PM EDT
# Author: Soren Andersen <intrepid -AT- perlmonk *dot* org>
# $Id$

use strict;
use warnings;
use YAML qw/ Load Dump LoadFile /;
use LWP::Simple;
use POSIX qw(isatty);
sub coremod { "" };
sub hr;
sub dimmer;
sub find_longest_keystring;
sub mtest;

sub testyml {
    my $metayml_uri =
      (shift(@_) || 'http://search.cpan.org/src/RUBYKAT/html2dbk-0.03/
+META.yml');
    my $docu;

    if( $docu = get $metayml_uri ) {
    return $docu
    }
    die "Could not retrieve '$metayml_uri'. Network troubles? Bad URI?
+";
}

## And now a brief interlude of presentational trivia, not very intere
+sting
my $screenW = $ENV{COLUMNS} || 42;
my $unxterm = isatty(*STDOUT) && $^O !~/MSWin32/ ? 1 : 0;
if ($unxterm) {
    require Term::ANSIColor and import Term::ANSIColor ('colored');
   #print colored("Using Term::ANSIColor", 'dark white'), "\n";
} ## done with interlude, back to main show

my $metadoc = testyml (shift(@ARGV) || undef);
my $modmeta = Load( $metadoc );

if( $modmeta->{requires} ) {
    my ($k,$v);
    my $fmtlen;
    my %reqrs = %{
                   my($mkl,@hash)
                    = find_longest_keystring($modmeta->{requires});
                   $fmtlen = $mkl || 28;
                   my $rh = {@hash};
                 };
    if (eval "use Module::CoreList; 1" and not $@)
    {
        no warnings ('redefine','once');
        sub coremod
        {
            my($pm) = @_;
            my $presence_in_core = $Module::CoreList::version{$]}{$pm}
+;
            return "\n" unless defined $presence_in_core;
            my $pmv;
            $pmv = $presence_in_core == 0 ? "without a VERSION number"
               : "version $presence_in_core";
            my $prn  = Module::CoreList->first_release($pm);
            my $note = <<"        ELEPHANT";

  CORE: $pm was first included in the core Perl distribution at Perl r
+elease $prn
        The present Perl system shipped with $pm $pmv
        ELEPHANT
            return $note;
        }
    }

    print hr;
    printf <<"        YODOWN"
 %-${fmtlen}s %s
   %s%s
        YODOWN
 => ($k,($v eq '0'? 'any version':"at version $v") , mtest($k), coremo
+d($k))
           while ($k,$v) = each %reqrs;
    print hr;
} else # there are no prerequisite modules or pragmata listed
    {  print "No requires for $modmeta->{name}\n"; }

sub mtest
{
    my $installed_version;
    my $wherep;
    my $modname = shift();
    my $modlibp = $modname;
    $modlibp =~ s{ :: } {/}xg;
    $modlibp .= '.pm';
    my $can_req = eval "use $modname; 1;";
  if   ($can_req and not $@)
    {
        no strict 'refs';
        $wherep = $INC{ $modlibp };
        $installed_version = (${$modname.'::VERSION'}) || 0;
    }
  else
    {
        return colored(sprintf(
            "%-32s is not installed"=> $modname) , 'cyan')
           if ($unxterm);
        return sprintf(
            "%-32s is not installed"=> $modname)
    }
    
    if ($unxterm) {
    colored(
        sprintf('%-32s v%4s found as %s'
         => ($modname , $installed_version , $wherep))
      , 'magenta' );
    } else {
        sprintf('%-32s v%-4s found as %s'
         => ($modname , $installed_version , $wherep))
    }
}

sub find_longest_keystring
{
    my %rethash = %{ shift() };
    return () unless 1 * @{[ %rethash ]};
    delete $rethash{'perl'};
    my $l_maxed_at = 0;
    for (keys(%rethash)) {
    $l_maxed_at = length() > $l_maxed_at ? length() : $l_maxed_at
    }
    return ( $l_maxed_at, %rethash );
}

sub hr
{
    my $decor = $unxterm
      ? dimmer("-" x $screenW)
      :       ("-" x $screenW);
    $decor . "\n";
}

sub dimmer
{
    colored( shift() , 'dark white' );
}
__END__

=head1 NAME

METAreqWeb

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  ./METAreqWeb [ <http://search.cpan.org/src/MOCONNOR/YAML-AppConfig-0
+.16/META.yml> ]

=cut
[download]

The Evil Embedded Space in Meditations
6 direct replies — Read more / Contribute by Intrepid
on May 30, 2005 at 02:53

This meditation mentions just a few thoughts about an aspect of using Perl on MSWin that has been periodically coming up in discussions on the chatterbox. That aspect is the presence or absence of embedded spaces in file pathnames. One can pretty much assume that others will have differing opinions from what I present here, hopefully someone will find it useful all in all.

Links provided for reader convenience:

links last checked: 2005.05.15
This software's documentation as POD: common_parent_dir
This script as syntax-hilighted HTML (without embedded POD): common_parent_dir.html
Script "production copy" "complete" (with inline POD): common_parent_dir.perl

MakeMaker-Makefile Reform School in Cool Uses for Perl
3 direct replies — Read more / Contribute by Intrepid
on Mar 30, 2005 at 17:38

Reforming the Makefile Madness for my specific machine / OS

NOTE: Updated Sat Apr 26 10:43:42 UTC 2008 to fix broken links pointed out in child node 682635

make and Makefiles and all pertaining to that are so uncool that for me they've wrapped right around back into cool.

Nothing at all to do with Perl... but something to do with Volunteering.

updated on Fri Mar 4 02:53:11 UTC 2005 --

a few changes of details (noted inline below)

I am so full of anger and frustration right now that has no outlet, so I decided that my daily cyberspace home was the only place where I could vent some of this in a way that felt at all meaningful.

The Story

The Cast of Characters: "A" and "B"

This is a story about two women and the society around them, and how one of them represents the kind that helps it all to hold together, and the other represents the kind that degrades it, generating the stress fractures that lead to massive failure, one little bit at a time.

Welcome to the home node of The Unreasonable Man! He goes by Soren, Sorentino, "somian", "amphibole", Soren Andersen)

Other Favorite Quotes

A little quote about religious tolerance, which I see as pertaining to the tendency of some Christians to shout "Persecution!" rather often nowadays:

“Perl is the portable distillation of the UNIX philosophy."— Scott McMahan

"Write documentation as if whoever reads it is a violent psychopath who knows where you live." —Steve English, as quoted by Peter Langston

You can disagree with my views about Perlmonks, surely,