File::ShareDir 1.00

File::ShareDir is a Perl module that provides a companion to Class::Inspector and File::HomeDir, modules that take a process that is well-known by advanced Perl developers but gets a little tricky, and make it more available to the larger Perl community.<br /><br />Quite often you want or need your Perl module (CPAN or otherwise) to have access to a large amount of read-only data that is stored on the file-system at run-time.<br /><br />On a linux-like system, this would be in a place such as /usr/share, however Perl runs on a wide variety of different systems, and so the use of any one location is unreliable.<br /><br />Perl provides a little-known method for doing this, but almost nobody is aware that it exists. As a result, module authors often go through some very strange ways to make the data available to their code.<br /><br />The most common of these is to dump the data out to an enormous Perl data structure and save it into the module itself. The result are enormous multi-megabyte .pm files that chew up a lot of memory needlessly.<br /><br />Another method is to put the data "file" after the __DATA__ compiler tag and limit yourself to access as a filehandle.<br /><br />The problem to solve is really quite simple.<br /><br /> 1. Write the data files to the system at install time.<br /> <br /> 2. Know where you put them at run-time.<br /><br />Perl's install system creates an "auto" directory for both every distribution and for every module file.<br /><br />These are used by a couple of different auto-loading systems to store code fragments generated at install time, and various other modules written by the Perl "ancient masters".<br /><br />But the same mechanism is available to any dist or module to store any sort of data.<br /><br />SYNOPSIS<br /><br /> use File::SharedDir ':ALL';<br /> <br /> # Where are distribution-level shared data files kept<br /> $dir = dist_dir('File-ShareDir');<br /> <br /> # Where are module-level shared data files kept<br /> $dir = module_dir('File::ShareDir');<br /> <br /> # Find a specific file in our dist/module shared dir<br /> $file = dist_file( 'File-ShareDir', 'file/name.txt');<br /> $file = module_file('File::ShareDir', 'file/name.txt');<br /> <br /> # Like module_file, but search up the inheritance tree<br /> $file = class_file( 'Foo::Bar', 'file/name.txt' );

Requirements:	No special requirements
Platforms:	*nix, Linux
Keyword:	Access,  Enormous,  Filenametxt,  Files,  Fragments,  Install,  Method,  Module,  Modules,  Result,  Shared,  Store,  System,  Systems
Users rating:	0/10