http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1008491


in reply to Key-Board Interactive Perl Application

Term::ReadLine is a core module which facilitates keyboard interactions a lot and is extremely rich in features.

The simplest approach to execute the input text is eval.

Depending if it's just a personal play tool or an application for other users you should consider limiting what input is executed!

E.g. Grandfather showed you an approach to limit input to methods of a special class w/o eval, which is quite safe!

Example: Just taking the synopsis-code from term-readline already does most of the trick. Additionally limiting to package 'allowed_subs" is a (weaker) protection against misuse.

use Term::ReadLine; my $term = Term::ReadLine->new('Simple Perl calc'); my $prompt = "Enter code: "; my $OUT = $term->OUT || \*STDOUT; while ( defined ($_ = $term->readline($prompt)) ) { my $res = eval("package allowed_subs; $_"); warn $@ if $@; print $OUT $res, "\n" unless $@; $term->addhistory($_) if /\S/; } package allowed_subs; sub ab { `xmessage "@_"` # Pop-Up input (linux only) }

Cheers Rolf