i am designing a CLI. once a user starts the script he has to enter a command.based on that command the script performs the required action.
here is my code
$myhash{"set time"}=\&settime;
        $myhash{"show time"}=\&showtime;
        $myhash{default}=\&error;


        print "Welcome to nMetrics application monitor\n";
        print "Please type in a command\n";


        while(<STDIN>)
        {
                chomp;
                $res="false";
        foreach $k (keys %myhash)
                {
                        if ( $k eq "$_" )
                        {
                        &{$myhash{$k}}();
                        $res="true";
                        }
                }
        if ($res eq "false")
                {
                        &{$myhash{default}}();
                }
        }

[download]
so basically i put all the commands in a hash and read from stdin and than invoke the required command.
but later on these commands would increase to more than 20. and having such a big hash would not be a good idea.
so is there any more efficient way of handling this problem? previously i was doing it using if else statements. but thanks to one of the monks who gave me this wonderful idea. is there a more smarter idea than this?

In reply to CLI using hashes by bahadur

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