Hello, all. In response to this node, I decided to finallize and publish something I've been working on... a module that replaces directories in @ARGV with their contents, recursively (by tieing @ARGV, and traversing directories as they are accessed). The idea is (obviously) that a user could type:

perl -mr -ne 'print if /foo/' *
[download]

and get the same behavior as from

grep -r foo *
[download]

Anyway, the thing that I'm offering for comment is basically, should I make it -mr or make it -MR? (And also, of course, if anyone has a reasonable reason why I'd be on crack to even do this, or that it's already been done in a useful enough manner.) The obvious implication being that the tie @ARGV,... occurs either in file-scope or in the import method... which is a miniscule code change, that I'd be happy to make before offering this up to CPAN.

My reasons for wanting to use -mr over -MR are perhaps silly, but quite frankly:

• it saves a keystroke (the shift key)
• it is mostly going to be used with other lower-case switches (-p, -n, -e, -i, -l)
• it's a closer syntax to its closest cousin, grep -r

I think those are all valid things to consider, since we're talking about what effectively amounts to a command line switch.

The costs, however, are that:

• a lowercase module name implies that it is a pragma... and this is only sort of like a pragma (but not really)
• it won't work quite like a normal module, being use'd, because the magic occurs when the file is required, without anything happen at import time

I think it's obvious that the m and r should be in the same case, as perl -mR -e ... or perl -Mr -e ... are just shift-key gymnastics that nobody wants or should have to go through.

Thoughts? Comments? Also, is there a more definitive place to take this question, like comp.lang.something-or-other?

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