G'day Craigbert,

Welcome to the monastery.

The short answer is yes: you can break up your code into modules, gathering related functionality into separate modules and putting each module into its own file.

The longer answer is going to depend on what code you're actually dealing with: beyond knowing it's large, "does a LOT of stuff" and "jumps around a bit", we don't have a lot to go on.

As a start, given you're "VERY new to Perl", I'd suggest you bookmark the Online Perldoc (perl page): possibly read perlintro in the Overview section; look at what's available in the Tutorials section (maybe skimming some of the FAQs); and just make a mental note of the contents of the Reference Manual. Basically, there's far too much to read: get a feel for where things are documented so you can look them up quickly as you need to.

For creating the modules, take a look at perlmodlib - Modules: Creation, Use, and Abuse, perlmodstyle and perlmod.

-- Ken


In reply to Re: How best to break apart a large perl program by kcott
in thread How best to break apart a large perl program by Craigbert

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.