Re^2: Activating a screen saver problems

[palkia]

I have no idea what #!/usr/bin/perl -w does,
I've never heard about '/s',
and the requirement to be in the screensaver directory doesn't make any sense to me.

Regardless my experiments confirmed both the '/s',
and the directory necessities (guess I got more fundamentals to learn than I thought ^^).
Thank you very much, it works gr8.

[golux]

Hi palkia,

By "be in the screensaver directory", I only meant that you have to run my script from wherever the screensavers are located. In my case it's C:\WINNT\system32, in your case it's apparently C:\WINDOWS\system32. But since you're giving the whole path, that's fine too.

The #!/usr/bin/perl -w line is not as important in Windows as in Linux, although the -w is quite useful (it enables "warnings"). You can read about "warnings" and "strict" in the perllexwarn documentation.

I wrote a screensaver in Perl several years ago (haven't finished it though), and remembered there was a way to invoke a screensaver from the command line. A search quickly led me to the /s switch.

Good luck and much enjoyment with your continued path in Perl!

[palkia]

I understood what you meant by "screensaver directory",
I just don't understand why simply giving the entire path isn't good enough (why must be "in" the directory).
But experimenting did show it's necessary to do it your way.
Probably the '/s' part is wrongly interpreted as a directory deepening, do to the other / or \ in the path string.

I'm guessing #!/usr/bin/perl -w is like "use warnings", I'll read about it later ^^.

Thx again

[golux]

Hi palkia,

Sorry if I was confusing; I didn't mean you had to be in the directory. I just did it that way myself because I was lazy, and wanted to experiment with running the screensaver in a command ("cmd") window (so I only had to type the screensaver name, not the full path). But giving the full path is fine, and doesn't seem to conflict with the /s switch when I do it this way (note the space before the /s switch):

use strict;
use warnings;
system('C:/winnt/system32/sspipes.scr /s');

And yes, the "-w" part of the "shebang" line, as it's called, is for warnings (again, look at perllexwarn). The rest of the first line is more germane to Linux systems, where it specifies the path (ie. directory) where Perl is located (ie. "/usr/bin/perl"). But on Windows you can safely remove the entire first line, and the script should still run.