Neither!

I consider it a rather large mistake to have a tool that you invoke via either "perl ..." or "....pl ...". I often make improvements to tools that result in them being implemented in different languages. A tool might start out as a shell script or batch file and later become a Perl script and then a compiled executable (sometimes these transition even happen in the other direction). I just want to use the tool, using a descriptive name. I don't want to think about what language it happens to have been implemented in this week.

And I really don't want to worry about updating a bunch of other tools that make use of that tool just because I decide to change implementation language.

For me, the *.pl file is the source code for the script. It starts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" plus whatever options the script needs. Then there is the install process that does the follow things on Unix:

• Remove the ".pl" from its name
• Move the script to the proper directory in $PATH
• Change the "/usr/bin/perl" part to the correct path to perl (if on a broken system that doesn't have /usr/bin/perl or perhaps where /usr/bin/perl is the wrong version of Perl).
• chmod a+x

On Win32:

• Run pl2bat (which changes the ".pl" to ".bat")
• Move the script to the proper directory in %PATH%

                - tye

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