You can always unshift directories into @INC whenever you want. What you haven't specified is how are you going to let the program know what directory it should unshift. Once you get it into the program, it's easy:

## File: FOO.pm
package FOO;
print "loading foo\n";
sub foo { print "in foo::foo\n"; }
1;
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## main program
use autouse 'FOO' => qw/foo/;
unshift @INC, '.';
foo;
__END__
loading foo
in foo::foo
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Thanks for your quick response. I have information on the directory that this module will reside. The perl script is designed as a file watcher and the process files with the functions from the module. In the loop (for file watcher) i look to see if the common mount point exists and if it does then I call the modules function to process the file. so if I understand you correct, I could do

## PERL SCRIPT ##

#!/usr/bin/perl;
use strict;

my $g_commonMount = "/common_mount";
my $g_moduleDir = "$g_commonMount/include";

sub fileWatcher
{
   while(1)
   {
      if ( -d $g_moduleDir )
      {
         use autouse 'foo' => qw/foo/;  #using your example
         unshift @INC, '$g_moduleDir';  #foo.pm is under $g_moduleDir
         foo;
      }

      sleep (10);

   }
}

#### MAIN ###
&fileWatcher;

__END__
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Ah, the directory is known from the beginning. That makes things easier. There's no need to unshift anything, since you can use lib(*).

#!/usr/bin/perl
## untested
use warnings;
use strict;

my ($g_commonMount, $g_moduleDir);
BEGIN {
  $g_commonMount = "/common_mount";
  $g_moduleDir = "$g_commonMount/include";
}
use lib $g_moduleDir;

sub file_watcher {
  while (1) {
    sleep 10, next unless -d $g_moduleDir;

    use autouse 'foo' => qw/foo/;
    foo;
  }
}

file_watcher;
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I'm not particularly proud of the BEGIN block but maybe there's another way to do it. Also, instead of autouse(*), you can use require.

(*) CPAN seems down now, so the links to the modules may be wrong, since they are core and I don't know if one can link to them in the same fashion as any other.

--
David Serrano