Re^2: Looking for suitable spells to get open to return a filehandle from a module

[talexb]

This is a fair question, and I appreciate that it has the potential to be a disaster.

I'm running scripts that do some ETL processing, and it would be handy to be able to version the result reports so that I could go back and see how this run's results compared to the previous result's runs. The tricky part is creating something relatively lightweight that I can sneak onto the command line, rather than remember to save the previous run's results (mv results.txt results.txt-5, for example).

I've also been meaning to contribute something to CPAN for far too long, and this is something relatively innocuous that might be useful to someone, somewhere. I could be using git for this -- but I need to stretch a little, and write something useful.

[kikuchiyo]

It's good to know that you are aware of the pitfalls.

Still, I'd recommend that you use a VCS (git or mercurial) under the hood for this. They are optimized to store and retrieve previous versions (that is their primary job after all), they give you tools to compare versions, and they give you context for each version you commit (or your module commits).

Yes, you could say that you don't really need all that, you just need something that hides and automatizes that mv results.txt results.txt-5 step, but little projects like this tend to accrete features and use cases, and before you know, you're stuck with an underdesigned, metastatised monster of a system.