Greetings from chilly, snowy Buffalo (NY, USA). I spent about 6 years doing no programming at all and now I'm using perl again. I am still hooked on it. So this week I started exploring CPAN modules that give info about and, in some cases, modify, the filesystem. I know of 3 modules that are used for that: the core module File::Spec, the module Path::Class (used it and liked it, a while back), and the module Path::Tiny. This meditation focuses on Path::Tiny, which seems to be stalking me. I see a lot of module authors using it in their code (that is, it has become a common dependency).

Path::Tiny is probably a bit of a misnomer. It has many methods. Many many. What I was most interested in this week was the method tempdir. Something about how tempdir works took me by surprise (yes, I am finally getting around to the point of this meditation :). The method returns a {normalized, right-slashed, absolute} pathname, but it also creates the temporary directory. Maybe I am odd, but I expected to be given a string and then create the directory with that pathname myself!

Below, some code (playful deliberately) that uses tempdir and will demonstrate that when tempdir is called, a directory is created.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
# Last modified: Wed Dec 04 2024 10:48:30 PM -05:00 [EST]

use strict;
use v5.18;
use utf8;
use warnings;

=head1 NAME
pathology.pl

=cut

use Term::ReadKey qw/ReadMode ReadKey/;
use File::Spec;
use Path::Tiny;

my $user;

sub versions
{
   say
       $File::Spec::VERSION, q[ ]
   ,   $Path::Tiny::VERSION ;
}

sub who
{
    no warnings 'deprecated', 'experimental';
    use Config;
    given (lc( $Config{osname} )) {
        when ('linux')    { $user = $ENV{USER}     }
        when ('cygwin')   { $user = $ENV{USER}     }
        when ('mswin32')  { $user = $ENV{USERNAME} }
        default           { say "osname is something we don't know, " 
+,
                                "we'll guess it's something Unixy, so 
+" ,
                                "let's say that user name is " ,
                               getlogin || "null";
                            $user = getlogin;
                          }
    }
    return $user;
}
# ------------------------------------------------------------- #
# For all its wealth of methods, I found no direct equivalent of
# "tmpdir" in Path::Tiny, so I use File::Spec's.
say "We use " , File::Spec->tmpdir , " for temporary files.";
# ------------------------------------------------------------- #
say "We are currently in directory " , Path::Tiny->cwd;
say "Our filesystem is rooted at " , Path::Tiny->rootdir;
say "Aha, " , who() , ", we may have a temp dir for you!";
my  $tadah = Path::Tiny->tempdir(TEMPLATE => "${user}-XXXXXXXX");
say "Maybe we have made a temp directory at " , $tadah , ", let's see:
+";

if ( -e $tadah and -d $tadah ) {
    say "'$tadah' already exists and is a directory.";
    say "Type 'y' if you wish to remove this directory:";
    ReadMode 'cbreak';
    my $reply = ReadKey(0);
    ReadMode 'normal';

    if (lc $reply eq "y") {
        print "Ok, we are going to attempt to remove it now ..." ;
        rmdir($tadah) and say "Success."
                       or say "BAH! Could not remove it, reason: $!";
    } else {
        say "Ok, leaving $tadah alone.";
    }
} else {
    mkdir($tadah => 0777) and say "created temp dir."
                           or die "We couldn't make a directory \"$tad
+ah\"", $!;
    sleep 6;
    rmdir($tadah) and say "$tadah removed."
}
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