Re: Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path ($PATH/%PATH%)

[Anonymous Monk]

in reply to Executing a program from within a Perl Module in a non-standard path

What would I do in this instance?

do what every operating system does, create an environment variable, like $PATH, and have it be a "list" of directories to search for binary executables. Since one exists for this purpose already, you could use it, but you don't have to
use lib ...;
use PathStuffer;
use File::Which;
my $frobnitz = which('checkout.pl');
system $frobnitz, ...

package PathStuffer;
use Env '@PATH';
use File::Find::Rule;
push @PATH, find( -file => name => qr{\.pl$} => in => $startdir);

See also Toolkit, String::ShellQuote/Win32::ShellQuote and/or IPC::System::Simple or IPC::Run/IPC::Run3 .. String::ShellQuote/Win32::ShellQuote and/or IPC::System::Simple or IPC::Run/IPC::Run3

[GoldElite]

Hmmm. It feels a little heavy-handed to modify the PATH for each potential script/executable after a recursive search, considering I technically know where they are stored (in the directory of the calling project/script, given a heirarchy of projects).

On top of that, since I don't know it explicitly (that's pretty much the entire problem here!), $startdir will always be the cwd, too (or at least $FindBin::Bin), which would be redundant if PathStuffer is used multiple times (the search is probably a negligable impact in this day and age, but still. ;) ).

Also, it's not always the case that a file will be a script (note that 'rdiff' is an executable binary), so just searching for ".pl" doesn't quite cover all use cases. Since *nix binaries don't really have naming conventions (and hence I'd have to search for ".*"), I'd necessarily be including every directory into the path to include it, which just makes me feel dirty. (It probably wasn't obvious that I'm using *nix boxes here, but I'd like to keep the code portable either way)

 

That said, this is certainly still a viable option that I wouldn't have considered otherwise :)