Musings

Last time , I created a function to determine if a target file was out of date with respect to its sources. Now I want a function similar to UNIX' touch(1) that will update the atime and mtime of a file. And, like touch(1) , it should be able to create empty files. The way to do this is to use Perl's utime function, which is based on UNIX' utime(2) function.

On occasion, I need a script that will updates reports but only when the sources have changed. This is typically creating an XML file from log files or creating a static page for a web site. Here is a function to determine if the sources have changed after the last time the report was created.

I used Data::Dumper a lot but it leaves something to be desired. By adding a function to MyUtils.pm , a simpler interface can be achieved.

In a previous article , I created an empty module for some utilities. Now is the time to populate it...and to develop tests for the subroutines.

From time to time, I add diagnostic messages to be printed by my code so I can track what the program is doing. I often wondered if there was a way to get Perl to conditionally compile these statements and to get it to do so automatically. Here's how:

Although there are many useful utility subroutines in Perl's standard modules, there are some that are missing. I'm going to spend the next few posts describing a few.