Re: Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path ($PATH/%PATH%)

What would I do in this instance?

do what every operating system does, create an environment variable, like $PATH, and have it be a "list" of directories to search for binary executables. Since one exists for this purpose already, you could use it, but you don't have to use lib ...; use PathStuffer; use File::Which; my $frobnitz = which('checkout.pl'); system $frobnitz, ...

package PathStuffer; use Env '@PATH'; use File::Find::Rule; push @PATH, find( -file => name => qr{\.pl$} => in => $startdir);

Comment on Re: Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path ($PATH/%PATH%)

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Re^2: Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path ($PATH/%PATH%) by GoldElite (Beadle) on Mar 20, 2013 at 11:45 UTC
Hmmm. It feels a little heavy-handed to modify the PATH for each potential script/executable after a recursive search, considering I technically know where they are stored (in the directory of the calling project/script, given a heirarchy of projects). On top of that, since I don't know it explicitly (that's pretty much the entire problem here!), $startdir will always be the cwd, too (or at least $FindBin::Bin), which would be redundant if PathStuffer is `use`d multiple times (the search is probably a negligable impact in this day and age, but still. ;) ). Also, it's not always the case that a file will be a script (note that 'rdiff' is an executable binary), so just searching for ".pl" doesn't quite cover all use cases. Since nix binaries don't really have naming conventions (and hence I'd have to search for "."), I'd necessarily be including every directory into the path to include it, which just makes me feel dirty. (It probably wasn't obvious that I'm using *nix boxes here, but I'd like to keep the code portable either way) That said, this is certainly still a viable option that I wouldn't have considered otherwise :)	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path ($PATH/%PATH%)
by GoldElite (Beadle) on Mar 20, 2013 at 11:45 UTC

Hmmm. It feels a little heavy-handed to modify the PATH for each potential script/executable after a recursive search, considering I technically know where they are stored (in the directory of the calling project/script, given a heirarchy of projects).

On top of that, since I don't know it explicitly (that's pretty much the entire problem here!), $startdir will always be the cwd, too (or at least $FindBin::Bin), which would be redundant if PathStuffer is used multiple times (the search is probably a negligable impact in this day and age, but still. ;) ).

Also, it's not always the case that a file will be a script (note that 'rdiff' is an executable binary), so just searching for ".pl" doesn't quite cover all use cases. Since *nix binaries don't really have naming conventions (and hence I'd have to search for ".*"), I'd necessarily be including every directory into the path to include it, which just makes me feel dirty. (It probably wasn't obvious that I'm using *nix boxes here, but I'd like to keep the code portable either way)

That said, this is certainly still a viable option that I wouldn't have considered otherwise :)

[reply]
[d/l]