in reply to using .profile in perl

You have given us no information about what is in the ./home/apps/profile and how you are calling, but I presume that it contains bash variable assignments (export FOO='bar') and you are using system() or exec() to call it.

These get run in a separate process which runs and exits and does not affect your currently running process.

But it seems silly to use bash to set environment variables from a perl script, when you can do $ENV{FOO} = 'bar'.

You can just open the file, read it in line by line and assign the values to keys of %ENV.

Also, why are you using environment variables? I could understand it maybe if you were possibly calling a non-perl program from your script, but if this is all in perl, why not load your config variables using YAML or YAML::Syck?

use YAML();
our %Config = YAML::LoadFile('./home/app/profile');

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and in ./home/app/profile: 
---
foo:    bar
arrayref:
   - 1
   - 2
   - 3
hashref:
   foo:   bar
   baz:   bar

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Re^2: using .profile in perl
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 20, 2006 at 02:29 UTC
    ok here's some background on the current situation: We have 2 instances of our application setup on 1 server, but using different ports to use the application. So, rather than having two different logins for each instance, we have created 2 different .profile (ofcourse they both contain different names) The .profile basically sets up the environment values for each instance.
    I have a perl script that needs to be run on both instances..but I want to just have 1 version of the script, rather than duplicate the script on both instances. Also, some of the code within script is interrelated...for eg. I may want to call another script within this one, and use that information to do something else on the other instance. That is the reason, I want to source the .profile within the perl script...such that I want to change the environment half way through the perl script.
    I hope this helps in your understanding of our problem. Sorry if i'm doing a bad job at explaining, but I'm really new to scripting.
[reply]

      You could do something like the following (using ENV rather than foo):

      use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dump::Streamer;

my %foo = (a => 'b', c => 'd');
my @stack;

my %newFoo = (x => 'b', y => 'd');

push @stack, {%foo};
%foo = %newFoo;
print "Using \%newFoo\n";
Dump (\%foo);

# do stuff with temporary foo

%foo = %{pop @stack};
print "restored original \%foo\n";
Dump (\%foo);

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      Prints:

      Using %newFoo
$HASH1 = {
           x => 'b',
           y => 'd'
         };
restored original %foo
$HASH1 = {
           a => 'b',
           c => 'd'
         };

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      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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