For a long time, I've been looking for a solution to bring Mac, Windows and Linux behaviour closer. My use case : I work in a corporate Windows environment (where you don't want to install unecessary software), but still would like a friendly CLI (I'm not great at it).

I use UnxUtils, BusyBox-w32 and other utils to have a bearable experience on Windows, but they don't provide the same features/options as you'll find on macOS or Linux. Then I heard about the PerlPowerTools and thought they'd be perfect for having the same behaviour across these platforms. Even though I somehow find them hard to use due to namespace conflict with system utilities.

So, I've updated (my fork of) the PerlPowerTools to behave like BusyBox and bundle them (with PAR::Packer) as a single Windows executable.

Result : You can call the tools similarly on all three platforms. 

bin/cat
bin/perlpowertools cat
packed/perlpowertools.exe cat
packed/cat.exe

[download]

The additional benefit is that I can complement my Windows toolbox with my own (Perl) scripts. For example, add ack! to perlpowertools.exe just by copying the singl e-file version to PerlPowerTools's bin directory and running the 'packer' script.

Any feedback, beta-testing or else are welcomed.

https://github.com/kal247/PerlPowerTools

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: PerlPowerTools as single Windows executable
by stevieb (Canon) on May 26, 2022 at 21:42 UTC

    Can you please provide some examples of how your work is executed, and what its results are? ie. Show us what it does?

[reply]

      Well, I'm afraid there's not much to show, but here are the 3 parts :

      1. The script 'util/packer' calls PAR::Packer 'pp' to bundle all tools (and POD) as 'PerlPowerTools.exe' : 

      # build packed executable
system(
    "pp",
    "-v",
    "-I", "lib", # include PerlPowerTools.pm, used for $VERSION
    "-F", $podstrip, # apply PodStrip but keep PerlPowerTools doc
    "-a", "$podfile;$packedpodfile", # include perldoc doc
    "-o", "$ppt_dir/packed/perlpowertools.exe",
    @tools
) == 0 or die "system failed: $?";

      [download]

      2. The "fake" tool '~/perlpowertools/bin/perlpowertools' is a frontend/dispatcher to execute the tool supplied as first argument, either from '~/perlpowertools/bin' or from the (extracted) bundle : 

      my $ppt_bin = defined $ENV{PAR_TEMP} ? "$ENV{PAR_TEMP}/inc/script" : d
+irname(abs_path($0));
...
my $file = "$ppt_bin/$tool";
$0 = $tool; # for usage/warning/error messages
my $return = do $file;

      [download]

      3. The "fake" tool '~/perlpowertools/bin/perldoc' is the real perldoc, but with a custom search path to find POD in '~/perlpowertools/bin' or in the (extracted) bundle : 

      # let perldoc also search in perlpowertools bin
unshift @INC, dirname(abs_path(__FILE__));

      [download]

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