Esteemed fellow monasterians,

I have a function that is aliased to several different names, and I want it to behave slightly differently depending on which name it was called by. Here is a baby example of what I have in mind:

sub MainSub {
    my $name = (caller 0)[3];
    print "My name is $name\n";
}

*sub1 = \&MainSub;
*sub2 = \&MainSub;
*sub3 = \&MainSub;

sub1();
sub2();
sub3();
[download]

I had hoped and expected this to print out:

My name is main::sub1
My name is main::sub2
My name is main::sub3
[download]

Instead I get:

My name is main::MainSub
My name is main::MainSub
My name is main::MainSub
[download]

I assume by this that the form of aliasing I'm doing on the functions is more comparable to a symbolic link than a hard link, though not being familiar with Perl's guts I don't know how the caller function is implemented. Do any of you know of a way for a function to get at the name it was actually called by in the code as opposed to the name of the original function definition? Currently, I am getting the desired behavior by turning the subN's into wrappers around a call to MainSub:

sub MainSub {
   my $name = shift;
   print "My name is $name\n";
}

sub sub1 {MainSub('sub1')}
sub sub2 {MainSub('sub2')}
sub sub3 {MainSub('sub3')}
[download]

But I'm hoping for a more elegant solution.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.