Interview questions

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

Hi,

While attended an interview they asked this question. I don't know how to answers for this. Will any body explain this.

(i.e.)

1) What will happen if the perl file(*.pl) having the below text only.

my $test;
our $test;
local $test;

2) If you setup a custom Perl repository of Modules for your code, what environment variable should be set to the path for this repository, so that your modules can be used in Perl scripts on the system?

Any one can help me to know about this.
Thanks and regards, Mythili

Comment on Interview questions

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Interview questions by ww (Archbishop) on Dec 18, 2011 at 03:40 UTC
1) Nothing -- it's a trick question. 2) Do a bit of searching. Try such terms as "@INC" and lib or read the perlfaq8 FAQ sections. True laziness is a virtue; lazily asking others to find answers to well-documented facts is not.	[reply]
Re^2: Interview questions by Anonymous Monk on Dec 18, 2011 at 07:00 UTC
1) Nothing -- it's a trick question. Well, nothing important, but it does have an effect	[reply]
Re: Interview questions by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on Dec 18, 2011 at 10:56 UTC
1) I don't like trick questions. I think a better question is: explain the difference between "my" and "our" and "local". 2) I feel using environment variables for this is rather crude. Extra points if you ask the interviewer: a) under what circumstances are PERL5LIB and PERLLIB ignored? b) what are alternative ways to do this?	[reply]
Re: Interview questions by Anonymous Monk on Dec 18, 2011 at 03:08 UTC
1 ) Tutorials: Variable Scoping in Perl: the basics, Coping with Scoping 2 ) perlrun	[reply]
Re: Interview questions by cdarke (Prior) on Dec 19, 2011 at 11:27 UTC
1). Depends if the program is run with warnings on or not (-w option). If it is then: `"our" variable $test masks earlier declaration in same scope` [download] More likely the interviewer wanted you to say what the difference between `my`, `our`, and `local` is. 2). The interviewer probably wanted PERL5LIB or PERLLIB, but actually any environment variable could be used to set the path provided you `use lib $ENV{varname};` [download] Did you get the job?	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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