Don't give up on bzip2 or gzip just because they may not always be in the same place.

It may be simpler to write a routine to find the executable and run it than to get a module installed across all of those machines... If you can guarantee that at least gzip is on all the boxes, it shouldn't be too hard, in fact...

sub findCompressor {
    my @paths=(
         "/usr/bin".
         "/bin",
         "/usr/local/bin",
         "/usr/share/bin",
         "/opt/bin",
         "$ENV{HOME}/bin",
         "$ENV{HOME}/local/bin",
    );

    foreach my $prog('bzip2','gzip','compress') {
        foreach my $dir(@paths) {
            my $path="$dir/$prog";
            return $path if -x $path;
        }
    }

    # return some default non-compressing compressor??
}

# run once
my $compressor=findCompress();
[download]

Thanks, I really had not thought of that. What I might do is write the location of the compression binary to a file once I find it, then check that file first each time to be sure it is still there, if not, just look for it again.

Glad you like it :)

But I wouldn't save the location to a file.

Imagine a very bare bones server, where only compress is installed. Your script runs once, saves /bin/compress as the preferred compressor, and never notices the next week when bzip is installed. (It could also have trouble if the executable was moved or deleted...)

Compared with compressing a 600M file, I wouldn't worry about the overhead of doing (at most!) 21 -x's once each time your script starts up...
--
Mike

Many linux boxes also have the which command, so this could be simplified to,

my $prog;
for (qw/bzip2 gzip compress/) {
  chomp($prog = qx|which $_|);
  last if $prog;
}
print "Found: $prog\n";
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As gnu@perl said in his original post, the compression binaries may not be in the user's path.

which tells you where a program lies on your path, "which" may not help in this case... It could be added as an additional test, though.
--
Mike

You'll probably find most things in Meta as it seems to be the oddest module on CPAN :)

There is over 300 modules in the distribution and most look like wrappers for other modules or programs.

gav^

use strict ;
use warnings ;

use Compress::Zlib ;

binmode STDOUT;     # gzopen only sets it on the fd

my $gz = gzopen(\*STDOUT, "wb")
    or die "Cannot open stdout: $gzerrno\n" ;

while (<>) {
    $gz->gzwrite($_)
        or die "error writing: $gzerrno\n" ;
}

$gz->gzclose ;
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Thanks. It would seem that I didn't think past the obvious when reading the doc on Compress::Gzip. This would work fine, but I think that I am going to do what was suggested and just look for whatever compress program has been loaded onto the box. This way I can check for bzip2 then gzip and if all else fails just use compress.

This should allow me to use whatever the better compression binary is no matter what system I am on. I won't need to worry if the so-and-so libraries are on the destination machine or not.

Thanks for your solution. I am positive I will be using it in another project in the near future here.