The first thing I would do, besides document and burn everything, would be to format the code. Go through the program line by line, tabbing here, spacing there, and follow its flow. This way, you can guage what needs to be moved where, and what needs to be stripped away.

Turn on strict/-w and see what breaks. Course, do it in a test instance. Just my $.02. Sometimes I'm given projects like this as well, only its usually code I wrote months ago before I had this huge learning spurt.

You could always start over, with a fresh code base, and cut-n-paste things in as you need them. Rewritten as you see fit?

_14k4 - perlmonks@poorheart.com (www.poorheart.com)

In reply to Re: Rewriting a large code base by one4k4
in thread Rewriting a large code base by Ovid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.