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in reply to Modules as executable scripts?

Neat - I have a feeling I'll be doing this one day :)

One suggestion for those who feel queazy about 'magic' like this is that you can easily kick off a sub in a package with something like:

perl -MYour::Package -e run

where run is the name of a sub that requires no args. Which approach is neater is in the eye of the beholder.

I really like the comment from friedo that discussed using a similar approach to make a package that can be a standalone test script and also a base package for other tests.

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Re^2: Modules as executable scripts?
by friedo (Prior) on Jun 15, 2007 at 06:25 UTC
    perl -MYour::Package -e run

    Note that this only works if Your::Package exports run by default, since code executed via -e runs in the main package.

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      good point - completely correct.

      taking a look at the -M syntax in perlrun, a cute thing you could do is to implement (or override) import() in your package, and respond to triggers passed in:

      package DoIt;

sub import {
    &run if( $_[0] eq 'run' );
}

      [download]

      the following commandline:

      perl -MDoIt=run,arg1,arg2

      will call the DoIt::run sub with @_ set to qw(run arg1 arg2).

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