byterock

Well I was just cleaning up a few things in some very old code this AM and I noticed this

Use Config;


die "chown not available!" unless $Config{"chown"};

and a number of similar lines checking for what I though would be 'core' functions, (like I said this was an old piece of code).

What caught my eye was the 'Config' mod never run into that one before so I had a quick read. I quickly determined that all perl programmers will use this module in onlyu one of three ways

1. Never have a need for or even look at it or
2. Use all the time and sleep more soudly because of it or
3. Have a look at, play with until you corrupt your perl and then never play with again

Well I defiantly a solid '3' so I spend a few mins playing around and I tried this

use Config;
foreach (sort keys(%Config)){
	print "$_ : $Config{$_}\n"
}

Author : 
CONFIG : true
Date : $Date
Header : 
Id : $Id
Locker : 
Log : $Log
PATCHLEVEL : 14
PERL_API_REVISION : 5
PERL_API_SUBVERSION : 0
PERL_API_VERSION : 14
...
zcat : 
zip : zip

Of course there is lots of interesting stuff to be found in this list. What I should of done was read a little further along before I wrote the above as all I really needed to to was

print Config::config_sh();

and got the same result. Oh well a few extra minutes of coding never hurt anyone.

Well I did like'

print  Config::myconfig()

as that is the same as a 'perl -V' with out the path and lib info. I could see that one coming in handy someday as I would be good to check a few things when writing tests so one can skip or run separate tests.

The real serendipitous one for me today was that I could get info on the 'sig_name' and 'sig_number' of the installed perl from my big ass list. You see I have just started working on a module that will be making use of a little 'POSIX' programming. One thing I know is I will have to get it working in both Linux and Windows so this may come in handy when I go to write up some tests.

Well to the sys-admin programmer or those doing large scale configuration I could really see the use of this module and I guess it has been around forever I just never ran across it directly.

Always learning something new even in my old age.