@INC: search sequence of directories

[kdjantzen]

Greeting Monks,

after having learned through the answer to my previuos submission how to correctly specify the enviroment variable for a "use lib ..." statement I now found out that indepent of what I specify the directories appear in @INC in a specifc sequence.

In the environment variable I specify:
/home/.../MyTest:/home/.../home/MyModules
because I want use the modifications of certain modules located in MyTest instead of the appropriate unchanged modules in MyModules.

In @INC my directories always are listed as
... MyModules
... MyTest
other directories

My question:
How can I ensure that in @INC my directories are in the sequence that I specified?

Thanks for your help.

[shigetsu]

Excerpt from lib:

The parameters to use lib are added to the start of the perl search path. Saying

use lib LIST;

is almost the same as saying

BEGIN { unshift(@INC, LIST) }

Perhaps

BEGIN { push(@INC, LIST) }

does what you want?

[varian]

Whatever you specify in the environment variable (PERL5LIB) is supposed to be prepended to the @INC in the same sequence as per your specification. It works fine on my platform (Perl 5.8.5 on FC Linux).

What version/platform do your run? Did you export the shell environment variable after an update?

[kdjantzen]

I am running perl 5.8.6 under Suse Linux 9.3.

The environment variable is set by a bash script based on an option.
The bash script, in turn, calls the perl script.

[almut]

Can't replicate what you're reporting... (Suse Linux 10.1 here — though that shouldn't matter)

I tried it with several versions of Perl from 5.8.4 - 5.8.8. I always get

$ PERL5LIB=~/foo:~/bar perl -V
  (...)
  %ENV:
    PERL5LIB="/home/ab/foo:/home/ab/bar"
  @INC:
    /home/ab/foo
    /home/ab/bar
    /usr/local/perl-5.8.8/lib/5.8.8/x86_64-linux
    /usr/local/perl-5.8.8/lib/5.8.8
    (...)

(same thing if you export PERL5LIB in a separate shell command, of course...)

Could you provide a ready to run test case that demonstrates your problem?

[kdjantzen]

Is it of any significance that you use the variable PER5LIB?
In my bash script I create an environment variable PERLLIBDIR and in the perl script I refer to it by %ENV{PERLLIBDIR}

[almut]

yes, PERL5LIB is a special env variable for just that purpose :)

In case you'd rather make use of PERLLIBDIR, something like use lib split /:/, $ENV{PERLLIBDIR}; in your script should work as well.

(I suppose the '%' in %ENV{...} was just a typo...)