#!/usr/bin/perl
$ENV{WATSON} = "It Worked";
print "Shelling ...\n";
exec('ksh');
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%shell >./shellme.pl
Shelling ...
%shell >echo $WATSON
It Worked
%shell >
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I can interpret your question two different ways.

If you mean, "Can a Perl program in one file read and execute a Perl program in another file without creating another process", the answer is yes. You could read the file into a scalar variable, and eval it. The "read-ee" program would have access to the variables in the "read-er" program (discovering whether that's a good idea or not is an exercise for the reader ;-)

If you mean, "Can a shell program execute a Perl program in such a way that the Perl program can change variables in the Shell program", the answer is no. A shell can't "source" a Perl program. Unless you had a Perl shell, of course....

HTH

slurp "my_other_stuff";
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First I'd suggest reading perldoc perlmod and perldoc perlboot to get an idea of how packages and objects work in perl. I'll throw a quick example at you to get you rolling.

# here is my file of common stuff
package my_stuff; # this tells perl how to name this collection of thi
+ngs

sub my_function {
   # stuff
}

1;  # this let's perl know that the package has loaded ok.
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#!/usr/bin/perl

use my_stuff;   # this will look for a package named "my_stuff.pm" in 
+the directories listed in @INC

my_stuff::my_function($arg1,$arg2);
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This is a *very* simplified example, but I hope this helps.

/\/\averick
perl -l -e "eval pack('h*','072796e6470272f2c5f2c5166756279636b672');"

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

The basic idea is that the subprocess--the perl script--should print shell commands to its stdout, which the parent process--the shell--would capture and execute. For instance, here's a trival script to set your terminal type:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "TERM=", $ARGV[0], " export TERM\n";
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eval `myterm vt100`
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The subprocess may need to look at the SHELL environment variable so that it can produce sh or csh style output as appropriate. And the user wanting to use this command may want to set up an alias or shell function to make the command easier to type.

The unix "resize" command uses this technique. You should take a look at its man page.

require "dotsh.pl";
$ENV{SHELL} = "/bin/sh";
dotsh("/path/to/some/sourcable/file");
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You may be wanting something like this.

do "myfile";
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That will read in the specified file as perl and execute it in place right then.

The camel says its like doing a require with an eval, but more efficient and gives file and line for errors. It will re read and reparse the entire file for each call so it is not that good in loops unless the file changes with each pass of the loop.

We just ran into a snag with this though. It doesn't work right (or at least we haven't been able to make it work right) with the use of strict. Any ideas on that?

Update
The way we fixed it was by explicitly making the sourced file a package:

{ package PACKAGE_NAME;do "sourced_file.pl" };
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and then we had to explicitly call each symbol by its package name in order to reference the data "inside" the symbol.

print $PACKAGE_NAME::variable,"\n";
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Any other way we tried wouldn't work right *shrug*.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
- Jim
Insert clever comment here...