Two reasons to dislike the
eval come to mind immediately:
- You are firing up the compiler over and over again to parse Perl code, when in fact the only part that is changing is the indicies and the depth of those. That means you're using a very general pile of code to handle a well-known predictable subset, and you'll burn far too much CPU to do that in the long run.
- More specifically here, you aren't escaping things like ` and { in the directory names, so you'll get invalid compilations from time to time, which you aren't checking for. These could also be potential security holes, since I merely have to create a directory with a name like `my-proggy` and you'll now be executing it! Shame.
I consider any use of runtime
eval to be a red flag during a code review session. There really has to be no other way to do something, and let me tell you, there's almost always more than one
better way to do it.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
