Dear Monks, I have several scripts that I would like to be able to run on a variety of systems where I don't control the main installation directories. In particular, one of them is a perl 5.8.0 where the List::Util version is "1.07_00" and therefore refaddr is missing.

I tried creating my own override of the whole List::Util package, but the XS part was not portable to all systems.

Instead, to fill in the missing function, I created the following module: 

package PatchPackages;

use strict;
use version; our $VERSION = qv/0.0.1/;

sub import {
    require Scalar::Util;
    if (! Scalar::Util->can('refaddr')) {
      # Copied from more recent Scalar::Util code.
      # Makes up for this function being missing on some
      # of our 5.8.0 installations.
      *Scalar::Util::refaddr =
        sub ($) {
          my $pkg = ref($_[0]) or return undef;
          if (Scalar::Util::blessed($_[0])) {
            bless $_[0], 'Scalar::Util::Fake';
          }
          else {
            $pkg = undef;
          }
          "$_[0]" =~ /0x(\w+)/;
          my $i = do { local $^W; hex $1 };
          bless $_[0], $pkg if defined $pkg;
          $i;
        }
    }
}

1;

[download]

This seems a little messy, but it works. Does anyone know of a cleaner way to do this?

In reply to Patching a Package (Scalar::Util) by tall_man

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