You might consider moving many of those variables (ftp host, ftp user, email address, log directory, etc) into a configuration file. That would allow you to change these values in the future, without touching the source code. The config file could even be located in a place where your operations staff (if you have one) can modify it, allowing them to do things like update an email address without involving you at all.

I like to use Config::IniFiles (available on CPAN) for this purpose. I generally tie it to a hash, reducing the number of global variables that I have to keep track of.

Here's a sample config.ini file. It has separate values for testing and production, making it easy to switch from one to the other:

[prod]
ftp_host   = ftp.uslec.net
ftp_user   = cheese
ftp_pass   = whiz
log_method = both
def_email  = someone@somewhere.com
LOGFILE    = /u20/home/gvc/log/something.log
[test]
ftp_host   = ftp.uslec.net
ftp_user   = cheesetest
ftp_pass   = whiztest
log_method = both
def_email  = someonetest@somewhere.com
LOGFILE    = /u20/home/gvc/log/somethingtest.log

[download]

Here's a sample code snippet:

use Config::IniFiles;
our (%cfg);
my %ini;
tie %ini, 'Config::IniFiles', (-file => "config.ini");
%cfg = %{$ini{'prod'}};
print "I will FTP files to" . $cfg{ftp_host};

[download]

Wally Hartshorn

In reply to Configuration File by Wally Hartshorn
in thread Compress and FTP files by gnu@perl

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