(simple|short|script) logging

[hiseldl]

Have you ever written a script and needed a quick way to log-to-a-file. I've done this over and over, in the last several years that I've been writing perl. It's a simple and short way to log things to a file. For example:

# start the logfile
slog "$logfile";
slog "=======================================START=";
slog "= ".(scalar localtime);
# do some stuff
noslog;

# send to another logfile
slog "$another_logfile";
slog "=======================================START=";
slog "= ".(scalar localtime);
# do some stuff
noslog;

It has limitations, such as, only one log file can be written at a time. It uses IO::File, but that shouldn't be too much of a limitation, anymore. It also puts $_slogfh in the main:: namespace. Since I mostly use this for quick testing-type scripts, I don't run into any naming collisions.

My typical usage is that I remove newlines from each sub to get them both on their own lines, then, i just add them to any scripts where I need a quick log-to-a-file solution.

sub slog(@) { 
    $::_slogfh||=new IO::File $_[0],">>";
    print $::_slogfh @_,$/ 
};
sub noslog() { undef $::_slogfh };