unknown syntax

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

I have what appears to be a perl script. The file is a .bat, but appears to use a lot of perl.

What would the line

local *MY_VAR

mean? Especially if I don't see MY_VAR defined anywhere?

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Re: unknown syntax by JavaFan (Canon) on May 01, 2012 at 19:58 UTC
If you had seen `my $MY_VAR` would you be baffled because you had not seen $MY_VAR defined anywhere? ;-) Anyway, it localizes the type glob `MY_VAR`. Before we had autovivifying refs to filehandles, "everyone" used plain filehandles instead of references to handles. This was (and is) a way to localize handles.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: unknown syntax by furry_marmot (Pilgrim) on May 01, 2012 at 20:38 UTC
If it's a .bat file, it's a Windows batch file. Before Windows XP, you might or might not have been able to successfully run a Perl script on windows just by running it. One solution was to convert a perl script to a batch file (the Activestate distribution still includes a script to accomplish this). The script makes a copy of the perl script (replacing the extension with .bat) and puts a bunch of lines at the top so that if Perl is not installed, the batch file will exit gracefully. When you run the batch file, it calls perl.exe with the batch file as the argument, including the -x switch, which tells perl to skip everything until it finds a shebang line (which is `#!perl`). And as JavaFan pointed out, `local *MY_VAR` is defining it. Consider reading Learning Perl. It's a good read, and may be helpful to you. --marmot	[reply] [d/l] [select]