http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=57497


in reply to How do I re-initialize a class during runtime?

You might just want to save the state of your program to a file and re-spawn a new copy of self with this new data. Consider:
if (ClassFileChanged()) { my ($state_file) = SaveToStateFile(); if (!RespawnFromStateFile($state_file)) # I.E. 0 == no +error { exit(0); } else { warn "Could not reload $0 properly.\n"; } }
This will prevent you from crashing your program if you break your class file (i.e. typo, compile error, etc.) and it will give you a chance to fix it properly.

Of course, if you're inside of mod_perl, calling exit(0) will be futile, since mod_perl doesn't care about that sort of stuff and will just call the same program again for the next request.