Updating hard coded variable?

kdmurphy001 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi There Monks, Is there a way you can update a hard-coded variable? Looking for something along the lines of a run-time and previous run-time. I can go the run-time no problem but the only way I can think of to do the "previous" run-time, which would be displayed at the start of the script, would be to write it to a file and then pull from that file based on X criteria.

What I would rather do is have the previous run-time stored in the script and update it each time the script runs (or calculate an average). *Thanks for the tips guys. Wasn't sure if that was the "norm". I"ll go the database route. Thanks again!

Comment on Updating hard coded variable?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Updating hard coded variable? by Anonymous Monk on Oct 06, 2009 at 11:46 UTC
Configuration files, `File::HomeDir->my_data` with YAML/JSON or AnyDBM_File/DBD::SQLite...	[reply]
Re: Updating hard coded variable? by thunders (Priest) on Oct 06, 2009 at 13:53 UTC
Your first approach(writing the data to a flat file or to a database or DBM) is a totally sane way to do this. Modifying the script itself in-place is trickier, and much more error prone.	[reply]
Re: Updating hard coded variable? by tweetiepooh (Hermit) on Oct 06, 2009 at 16:09 UTC
There are ways to do (nearly) anything in Perl but self modifying code is "not a good idea". Is there a reason for not writing out to a persistent store (file/database)? You could wrap your script inside another script which would capture a return value and then pass that value into the script as a parameter on the next run but again that is a complex and odd way to accomplish what is better done with a data store.	[reply]