Slightly off topic, but maybe interesting to somebody....

There is a script out there somewhere that uses AS "perlscript" and IE to make the AS docs interactively searchable. I dont recall much more than that, but it was a nifty tool, and a good example of how you can use IE/web as a presentation engine for Perl. No web server needed, just AS and IE.

my $linkurl = 'http://zentara.net';
my $command = "mozilla -remote \"openURL($linkurl)\"";
if(fork() == 0){ exec ($command) }
[download]

UPDATE.. here is a little better script that will do local files too. There is a way to select between new-tabs and new-windows, but I didn't make a commandline switch for it. There are also some special syntax differences for firefox, which I don't use. So all, in all, if you could incorporate all the possibilites for IE,Mozilla, Firefox,etc, and have it auto detect urls or local files, you would have a cool module. Maybe Browser::AutoLoad? :-)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Cwd;
 
my $pid; 
my @docs;

if(@ARGV){  
   my $cwd = getcwd;

  foreach my $arg(@ARGV){
      if( $arg =~ /^http:\/\/.*$/ ){ push @docs, $arg }
       else{ push @docs , "file://$cwd/$arg" }
      }
 }
  else{  #load defaults
     @docs = qw(                 
                file:///home/zentara/1down/1GET
                http://www.google.com       
            );
    }

 # Look for instance of mozilla.
 `mozilla -remote "ping()"`;    
          
 if ( $? ) { 
 # Error, mozilla is not running.           
    if (!defined($pid = fork())) { # Undef branch of fork:       
       die "Cannot fork: $!";      
    } elsif ($pid == 0) {          # Child branch of fork:       
       `mozilla`;                  # Start new instance.... 
    } else {                       # Parent branch of fork:        
       do {
          `mozilla -remote "ping()"`;     
          #sleep 1;
      select(undef,undef,undef,.5);    
       } while ( $? );
    
    #sleep 1;  #give mozilla some time               
    select(undef,undef,undef,.5); 
                                  
     load_docs();
     $pid=waitpid($pid, 0); # Wait for the pseudo-process 
                            # containing the new mozilla instance 
                # to end.           
    }   
 } else { load_docs(); }
############################################################### 
 sub load_docs {    
    my $element;
    foreach (0..$#docs){
         if ( $docs[$_] =~ /~file:\/\// ) 
        { `mozilla -remote "openFile($docs[$_], new-tab)"` ; 
          #`mozilla -remote "openFile($docs[$_], new-window)"` ; 
        } 
        
     else { `mozilla -remote "openURL($docs[$_], new-tab)"` ;  
           # `mozilla -remote "openURL($docs[$_], new-window)"` ;  
       }
     } 
 }
[download]

Yeah, the cheater bit I used for Windows is the start command that dispatches the URL to the user-configured browser. I suspect there's an equivalent in Gnome/KDE (though I don't remember offhand). Unfortunately, without hard-coding a browser, I suspect this is both OS and X-environment specific on Unix. And I have no idea about MacOSX, though I suspect there's a similar "launch-url" command somewhere.

-xdg

Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.

My Debian desktop has the following alternatives setup:

www-browser (/usr/bin/w3m)

mozilla (
 +    1        /usr/bin/mozilla-suite
*     2        /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox
)

x-www-browser (
      1        /usr/bin/mozilla
      2        /usr/bin/epiphany
 +    3        /usr/bin/konqueror
*     4        /usr/bin/mozilla-firefox
)
[download]

So either mozilla or x-www-browser seem like sensible "launch-url" commands.

I agree that's a neat idea, launching a browser window to display search results. I wonder if you could provide an alternative launch mechanism that would work with *nix as well, dependent on $^O. Reusing an existing browser instance and possibly opening in a new tab would be nice :).

Also, some other ideas spring to mind, like a dependency checker that opens browser windows for all the modules that you need, but don't yet have installed.