hello

I've got a directory full of perl scripts that declare functions. These files are loaded into a Perl app-server when it starts up, but if any of the files either have compile errors, or don't end in a true value, the app server will stop but not start => stressed developers, grumpy editors.

To avoid this unhappy scenario, I wrote a simple test script that slurps each file in turn and uses a Safe to eval the code and catch errors before someone presses the big red restart button. I used Safe rather than eval because I wanted to prepare and manage the namespace in which the files are run, and protect the test's own namespace. I trust the code, um, morally, but I'm pretty suspicious of a lot of the older code's habit of stomping around in main::.

However, I'm finding what works in Safe on my own machine (Perl 5.8.0) doesn't work on the production box (5.6.0). I'm doing something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Safe;
use Opcode;

my $code;
{ local $/; $code = <DATA> }

my $box = Safe->new();
$box->permit(Opcode::full_opset);
my $return_code = $box->reval($code);

__DATA__
use strict;
use vars qw($foo @bar);
$foo = "Friday 13th: unlucky for some";
[download]

With thanks
ViceRaid