Re: Create and edit new scripts

It might be easier if you just have a "template.pl" file, copy that to the requested file name for a new script, and provide a command-line option for the user to indicate whether to fire up an editor on the new file. By using a command-line option (e.g. "-e" to start the editor), the code becomes a lot shorter and easier to read (no need for ALRM handling, reading from term, etc), and a lot easier to use.

And why not make the initial template something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

=head1 NAME

=head1 SYNOPSIS

=head1 DESCRIPTION

=head1 AUTHOR

=cut

use strict;
use warnings;
[download]

That will make it clear that some amount of documentation should be included, which is usually a very good idea. (You can use the given file name and the user's name to initialize the first and last POD fields -- that would be very handy!)

Comment on Re: Create and edit new scripts Download Code

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Re^2: Create and edit new scripts by johngg (Canon) on Apr 25, 2006 at 09:03 UTC
Your suggestions make a lot of sense. Documentation is a very good thing that I'm not very good at. I will have to get to grips with POD but it's something I have been putting off. The use of a command-line option would indeed make things easier but I wanted to use ALRM handling just to learn how to do it. I wrote this some years ago and the first cut of the ALRM stuff was pretty crude. I tweaked it more recently with the countdown, again because I thought it would be interesting to learn. I'm not sure about your "... and a lot easier to use." There's not a lot of difference between `% newscript -e fred` [download] and `% newscript fred ... prompt ... y` [download] Thank you for the feedback, JohnGG	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Create and edit new scripts by wazoox (Prior) on May 06, 2006 at 14:50 UTC
Your suggestions make a lot of sense. Documentation is a very good thing that I'm not very good at. I will have to get to grips with POD but it's something I have been putting off.</blocckquote> I know this is mere proselytism, anyway in case you don't really get into POD you could give ROBODoc a try. It has a couple of advantages: It sucks up much less space than POD; It mixes up fine with code and comments (you can easily make documentation from your comments); It works with any language I know of, so you can ROBODoc your Java, your html, your C and your PHP too. ROBODoc can build a one-document digest from a whole code tree; You can anyway generate HTML, RTF, PDF... from ROBODoc as well as POD; Last, you can also generate POD with the ROBODoc to Pod translator script.	[reply]