mifflin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I want to include a configuration file in my distribution.

So far I've come up with the following in my class to get a config file name and pass it the the super class constructor. The config file will be in the same directory as the class but with a .txt extension. 

package GetPaid::FlatFile::Artran;

use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Spec;

use base qw(GetPaid::FlatFile);
our $VERSION = '0.01';

my @Path = split /::/, __PACKAGE__;
my $Configfile = File::Spec->rel2abs((join '/', @Path). ".txt");

sub new {
   my ($class, $dir) = @_;
   $dir = '.' unless defined $dir;
   my $this  = $class->SUPER::new(
      "$dir/" . uc(pop @Path) . '.TXT', # data file to create
      $Configfile
   );
   bless $this, ref($class) || $class;
}

1;

[download]
Is this the correct way to do this?
Will there be any conditions under which this will not work?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: distribution config file
by jhourcle (Prior) on Jun 18, 2006 at 15:57 UTC

    I personally use __FILE__ to determine where the module is, and then determine the path seperator from that (although, I've never tested it on a non-unix system), and build the path to look at from there.

    if (!defined($__registryDir)) { 
        $__registryDir = __FILE__;
        ($__pathSeperator) = ($__registryDir =~ m/\bVSO\b(.*?)\bRegist
+ry/ );
        $__registryDir =~ s/\.pm$/${__pathSeperator}data/;
}

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    (the module is 'Physics::Solar::VSO::Registry', so I know that the characters between 'VSO' and 'Registry' should be the path seperator).

    I think there's a way to get the path seperator from the perl config, also.

[reply]
[d/l]

      There are two approaches to writing portable code to deal with paths. All systems running perl can cope with POSIX filenames, i.e. using '/' as a path separator. This works except when performing textual manipulation on a file spec in native format, though Windows can sometimes cope with a mixture of forward slashes and backslashes.

      The other approach is to use File::Spec, Cwd and friends in conjunction with the native syntax. If you do this, stick to native syntax throughout. Note that some OSes e.g. VMS, don't have a single 'path separator' but something more complicated.

      For more on this, see perldoc perlport and my YAPC portability talk slides.

      By the way, I don't think your approach will work in the OP's case.__FILE__ is an alias for $0 as far as I am aware, so this may not contain any path separators at all.

      --

      Oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
      My friends all rate Windows, I must disagree.
      Your powers of persuasion will set them all free,
      So oh Lord, won’t you burn me a Knoppix CD ?
      (Missquoting Janis Joplin)

[reply]
[d/l]
        "By the way, I don't think your approach will work in the OP's case.__FILE__ is an alias for $0 as far as I am aware, so this may not contain any path separators at all."

        "__FILE__ is the filename at that point in the program." -- Programming Perl.
        "$0 is the name of the program being executed." -- perldoc perlvar
[reply]
Re: distribution config file
by IOrdy (Friar) on Jun 19, 2006 at 07:39 UTC
    How about a combination of rel2abs and splitpath to get the directory. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Spec::Functions qw(rel2abs splitpath);
print rel2abs((splitpath(__FILE__))[1]);

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[reply]
[d/l]

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