Is this concise enough? (code)

[deprecated]

Yes, I am using perl where I could just be using the shell. In this case, I am using perl because it is a little less processor intense (fewer processes forked), and a lot clearer from a readability point of view.

The application is a wrapper around a tape stacker. I want to read in six tapes from a stacker, in sequence, using the command `mtx`. I'm reading its output, here:

slot_1  Full
slot_2  Full
slot_3  Empty
slot_4  Full
slot_5  Full
slot_6  Full
Drive: tape 3 loaded

I can then figure out which tape is in the drive and which ones need to be done. Anyhow, the code that I have created to parse that information is here:

# status in this case is the output of mtx, above...
my @fields = split m[\n|\s+], $status, 13;
my $loaded = pop @fields;
my %drives = @fields;

This is pretty cool, but I dont get a feeling of satisfaction from it. What would be a more concise yet still clear way to do this?

thanks
brother dep

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

[particle]

well this looked fun so i gave it a shot:

# using your output in var $status
my (%drives, $loaded);

# remove last line from $status and assign to $loaded
# of course, this assumes nice, predictable output, since 
# it's simply looking for the word Drive:
$status =~ s/\n(Drive:.+)$// && ($loaded = $1);

# create your hash with the remainder of $status
%drives = split( m[\n|\s+], $status, 12 );

i think your way is clearer, but it was an interesting diversion. at least now if i see some better examples, i'll have a good idea of what they're doing.

i tried, but i couldn't find any functions with side effects that could be put to good use here.

~Particle

[tye]

my( $loaded, %drives )= ( split m[\s+], $status, 13 )[12,0..11];

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

[chipmunk]

The regular expression you've used in the split is a bit odd. \s+ matches \n, so the regex is mostly redundant. The one difference can be seen with these two snippets:

my @fields = split ' ', "abc\n  def";
my @fields = split /\n|\s+/, "abc\n  def";

The first splits on "\n ", producing ('abc', 'def'), while the second splits on "\n" and " ", producing ('abc', '', 'def'). In other words, split /\n|\s+/ will give you null strings where there's a newline followed by whitespace (including blank lines).

One other point; your code depends on having exactly six slots. You might consider writing it to work with any number of slots.