I'm trying to come up with a neat way to log messages from my script. I'm logging messages to any of several destinations - stdout, a file, or a text widget, and currently I do this by calling multiple functions (one of which is included below), which isn't very clean. I'm also prioritising ($LOG_LEVEL) each message, and the other functions also support a $PrintFormal boolean, to switch on/off the timestamp output in some cases. 
use constant DEBUG  => 0;                # Log levels
use constant INFO   => 1;
use constant NORMAL => 2;
use constant WARN   => 3;
use constant ERROR  => 4;
my @LOG_LEVEL_NAME = ('DEBUG', 'INFO', 'NORMAL', 'WARN', 'ERROR');
my $LOG_LEVEL = DEBUG;

sub LogMsg {
  my $level = shift;

  unless ($level >= $LOG_LEVEL) {return}
  my ($sec, $min, $hour, $day, $mon, $year) = localtime;
  $LogCounter++;
  if (open LOG, ">> $LOGFILE") {
    printf LOG "%04d.%02d.%02d %02d:%02d:%02d.%d: ",
      $year+1900, $mon+1, $day, $hour, $min, $sec, $LogCounter;
    print LOG "$$: $Display: $LOG_LEVEL_NAME[$level]: @_\n";
    close LOG;
  }
}

LogMsg INFO, "Starting chooser mode...";

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What I'd like to do is combine my three functions into one, and seeing as how the function gets used quite a lot, I want it's usage to be as straight-forward as possible. I'm figuring this would probably work with a bit of binary arithmetic: 

use constant FILE   => 0b0001;
use constant STDOUT => 0b0010;
use constant GUI    => 0b0100;
LogMsg FILE|STDOUT, "Message";

[download]

But before I go ahead and implement this, I wanted to ask if anyone has any tips, or can point me to some existing code? Is there already a standard way of doing this? Ideally, I'd also like to be able to select a priority and formatting for each of the destinations!

In reply to Logging messages - is there a better way? by matt.tovey

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