Easy help for scripts

This assumes the following:

That you have pod in your script.
That you are using Getopt::Std. (Else modify for however you are processing command line options.)
That you have -h as a command line option that you will accept without arguments, whose presence indicates that you will display a help screen instead of running.

This implements the -h option.

if ($opt_h) {
  exec("perldoc", $0) or die "Cannot execute 'perldoc': $!";
}
[download]

Comment on Easy help for scripts Download Code

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Re: Easy help for scripts by chromatic (Archbishop) on Sep 10, 2001 at 06:40 UTC
Enter Pod::Usage (will be a core module in Perl 5.8): `use Pod::Usage; pos2usage() if $opt_h;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re (tilly) 2: Easy help for scripts by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 10, 2001 at 06:43 UTC
Nice, but I would tend to use that for an invalid invocation, and use the full documentation for a help screen. YMMV. UPDATE chromatic pointed out to me that you can get the full documentation out of Pod::Usage. But not as easily, and without the convenient pager behaviour...	[reply]