in reply to Testing if Perl Code is Valid - but don't execute!

One possibility for your case is the switch -c. This sort-of does what you want in that it

causes Perl to check the syntax of the program and then exit without executing it

assuming you don't use modules with side-effects or have side-effects in BEGIN, UNITCHECK, or CHECK blocks. By shelling it out, you guarantee not to muck up local variables. Perhaps something like: 

my $script = 'perlscript.pl';
if (`perl -c $script 2>&1` =~ /syntax OK/) {
    print "$script compiles\n";
} else {
    print "Parsing $script failed\n";
}

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Of course, this certainly fails on sorts of pathological cases. It might work as a stop gap for you, however, until you can bring your colleague over to your point of view.

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Re^2: Testing if Perl Code is Valid - but don't execute!
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Aug 10, 2010 at 22:17 UTC

    Update: I incorrectly remembered the question. The OP did not say the code is unstrusted. While perl -c can execute code, it won't affect the currently running script. Disregard the rest of the post if execute code without disrupting the current script it ok.

    One possibility for your case is the switch -c. This sort-of does what you want in that it

    No, it's possible to execute code when the script is still being compiled. 

    $ perl -c -E'BEGIN { say "owned" }'
owned
-e syntax OK

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    assuming you don't use modules with side-effects or have side-effects in BEGIN, UNITCHECK, or CHECK blocks. By shelling it out, you guarantee not to muck up local variables. Perhaps something like:

    That should be "assuming you don't use use". 

    $ cat Module.pm
package Module;
use 5.010;
say "owned";
1;

$ perl -c -e'use Module;'
owned
-e syntax OK

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