Re: Possible to have a module act as a standalone??

[zengargoyle]

while do-able, doing so makes life much more complicated for your users.

you want a module that can be run as a script, but the search paths for scripts (OS determined) and modules (Perl determined) are different. if it's in a place where it could be run as a script, then it can't be loaded as a module w/o hackery. ditto for the reverse, if it's in a place where it could be loaded as a module (use Foo;) then it's not in a place where it could be called as a script.

create a module Foo.pm in the usual place. write a small foo wrapper script to put in the OS's search path.

this doesn't stop you from placing the script code in the module. infact it's probably wise to do so.

# Foo.pm
package Foo;
...
sub foo {
  for (@_) { Foo->new($_)->blah->print; }
}
1;


#!/usr/bin/perl
# Foo wrapper script
use Foo;
Foo::foo(@ARGV);

i can't see a way around having two files when you want to be able to do 'foo "blah"' from the command line and 'use Foo;' in perl.

[thor]

you want a module that can be run as a script, but the search paths for scripts (OS determined) and modules (Perl determined) are different. if it's in a place where it could be run as a script, then it can't be loaded as a module w/o hackery. ditto for the reverse, if it's in a place where it could be loaded as a module (use Foo;) then it's not in a place where it could be called as a script.

Jigga-what? There is nothing saying that @INC and your PATH environment variable have to be disjoint. I'm not saying that it's a good idea to have overlap (nor am I saying that it's a bad idea; kinda titilating, actually), but you could put a new directory that is understood to contain such hybrid scripts at the end of both @INC and PATH:

push @INC, "/path/to/hybrids"
setenv PATH $PATH:/path/to/hybrids
export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/hybrids
...

You get the idea.

thor