I am trying to understand this code in Perl that I have inherited:
sub myfunc($)
{
my ($path) = #_;
unless ($^C)
{
# manipulate path
}
return $path;
}
But I do not understand the $^C test. What does it do?
Perl's -c switch compiles the source and tells you if the syntax is valid. However, Perl doesn't have a strict separation between compile-time and run-time. You can run some code during the compilation (BEGIN blocks), and you can compile code when you are running (eval()).
This means that you might think that you are safe while syntax checking, and that you would be wrong. The second example actually runs some code:
$ perl -c -le 'print "Hello!"'
-e syntax OK
$ perl -c -le 'BEGIN{print "Hello!"}'
Hello!
-e syntax OK
This is more important in IDEs. Many of these will continually run perl -c on your source so it can highlight problems. However, this also means that your IDE is now potentially a trojan horse for executing that code you just copied and pasted from Stackoverflow.
Thus, the $^C guard (see perlvar):
$ perl -c -le 'BEGIN{ print "Hello!" unless $^C }'
-e syntax OK
I'm guessing that the developer who put that there either had a bet to use all the special variables in one program, or was reacting to unwanted behavior from their tools.
Related
I'm looking for a shorter way to write simple one-offs like this:
perl -e 'use 5.016;say 4.3%3'
or
perl -e 'print 4.3%3 ."\n"'
I was hoping for an environment variable I could set that would be the equivalent of use 5.016 so I could just write:
perl -e 'say 4.3%3'
Perhaps I've overlooked something in the documentation?
perl -E 'say ...';
This is like -e but turns on all features (which say is one of). From perldoc/perlrun:
-e commandline
may be used to enter one line of program. If -e is given, Perl will
not look for a filename in the argument list. [...]
-E commandline
behaves just like -e, except that it implicitly enables all optional
features (in the main compilation unit). See
feature.
To be honest: my answer doesn't exactly answer your original question. You asked how to use/require a minimum Perl version. For that the solution given in #ThisSuitIsBlackNot's comment fits better:
perl -M5.016 -e 'say ...'
This turns on all features that came with Perl 5.16 and at the same time complains if your Perl version is less than 5.16. Look here and here for a when-came-what table.
The -E solution blindly turns on all features of your current Perl's version.
You also asked for an environment variable. There's indeed one:
export PERL5OPT='-Mstrict -Mwarnings -M5.016'
Switches in this variable are treated as if they were on every Perl command line.
Be cautious when using the environment variable and sharing code: if you forget to tell your colleagues about it (because you set it months ago in your .bashrc), then some snippets might work for you but not for others.
The follwoing code is Perl script, grep lines with 'Stage' from hostlog. and then line by line match the content with regex, if find add the count by 1:
$command = 'grep \'Stage \' '. $hostlog;
#stage_info = qx($command);
foreach (#stage_info) {
if ( /Stage\s(\d+)\s(.*)/ ) {
$stage_number = $stage_number+1;
}
}
so how to do this in linux shell? Based on my test, the we can not loop line by line, since there is space inside.
That is a horrible piece of Perl code you've got there. Here's why:
It looks like you are not using use strict; use warnings;. That is a huge mistake, and will not prevent errors, it will just hide them.
Using qx() to grep lines from a file is a completely redundant thing to do, as this is what Perl does best itself. "Shelling out" a process like that most often slows your program down.
Use some whitespace to make your code readable. This is hard to read, and looks more complicated than it is.
You capture strings by using parentheses in your regex, but you never use these strings.
Re: $stage_number=$stage_number+1, see point 3. And also, this can be written $stage_number++. Using the ++ operator will make your code clearer, will prevent the uninitialized warnings, and save you some typing.
Here is what your code should look like:
use strict;
use warnings;
open my $fh, "<", $hostlog or die "Cannot open $hostlog for reading: $!";
while (<$fh>) {
if (/Stage\s\d+/) {
$stage_number++;
}
}
You're not doing anything with the internal captures, so why bother? You could do everything with a grep:
$ stage_number=$(grep -E 'Stage\s\d+\s' | wc -l)
This is using extended regular expressions. I believe the GNU version takes these without a -E parameter, and in Solaris, even the egrep command might not quite allow for this regular expression.
If there's something more you have to do, you've got to explain it in your question.
If I understand the issue correctly, you should be able to do this just fine in the shell:
while read; do
if echo ${REPLY} | grep -q -P "'Stage' "; then
# Do what you need to do
fi
done < test.log
Note that if your grep command supports the -P option you may be able to use the Perl regular expression as-is for the second test.
this is almost it. bash has no expression for multiple digits.
#!/bin/bash
command=( grep 'Stage ' "$hostlog" )
while read line
do
[ "$line" != "${line/Stage [0-9]/}" ] && (( ++stage_number ))
done < <( "${command[#]}" )
On the other hand taking the function of the perl script into account rather than the operations it performs the whole thing could be rewritten as
(( stage_number += ` grep -c 'Stage \d\+\s' "$hostlog" ` ))
or this
stage_number=` grep -c 'Stage \d\+\s' "$hostlog" `
if, in the original perl, stage_number is uninitialised, or is initalised to 0.
I know this is incorrect. I just want to know how perl parses this.
So, I'm playing around with perl, what I wanted was perl -ne what I typed was perl -ie the behavior was kind of interesting, and I'd like to know what happened.
$ echo 1 | perl -ie'next unless /g/i'
So perl Aborted (core dumped) on that. Reading perl --help I see -i takes an extension for backups.
-i[extension] edit <> files in place (makes backup if extension supplied)
For those that don't know -e is just eval. So I'm thinking one of three things could have happened either it was parsed as
perl -i -e'next unless /g/i' i gets undef, the rest goes as argument to e
perl -ie 'next unless /g/i' i gets the argument e, the rest is hanging like a file name
perl -i"-e'next unless /g/i'" whole thing as an argument to i
When I run
$ echo 1 | perl -i -e'next unless /g/i'
The program doesn't abort. This leads me to believe that 'next unless /g/i' is not being parsed as a literal argument to -e. Unambiguously the above would be parsed that way and it has a different result.
So what is it? Well playing around with a little more, I got
$ echo 1 | perl -ie'foo bar'
Unrecognized switch: -bar (-h will show valid options).
$ echo 1 | perl -ie'foo w w w'
... works fine guess it reads it as `perl -ie'foo' -w -w -w`
Playing around with the above, I try this...
$ echo 1 | perl -ie'foo e eval q[warn "bar"]'
bar at (eval 1) line 1.
Now I'm really confused.. So how is Perl parsing this? Lastly, it seems you can actually get a Perl eval command from within just -i. Does this have security implications?
$ perl -i'foo e eval "warn q[bar]" '
Quick answer
Shell quote-processing is collapsing and concatenating what it thinks is all one argument. Your invocation is equivalent to
$ perl '-ienext unless /g/i'
It aborts immediately because perl parses this argument as containing -u, which triggers a core dump where execution of your code would begin. This is an old feature that was once used for creating pseudo-executables, but it is vestigial in nature these days.
What appears to be a call to eval is the misparse of -e 'ss /g/i'.
First clue
B::Deparse can your friend, provided you happen to be running on a system without dump support.
$ echo 1 | perl -MO=Deparse,-p -ie'next unless /g/i'
dump is not supported.
BEGIN { $^I = "enext"; }
BEGIN { $/ = "\n"; $\ = "\n"; }
LINE: while (defined(($_ = <ARGV>))) {
chomp($_);
(('ss' / 'g') / 'i');
}
So why does unle disappear? If you’re running Linux, you may not have even gotten as far as I did. The output above is from Perl on Cygwin, and the error about dump being unsupported is a clue.
Next clue
Of note from the perlrun documentation:
-u
This switch causes Perl to dump core after compiling your program. You can then in theory take this core dump and turn it into an executable file by using the undump program (not supplied). This speeds startup at the expense of some disk space (which you can minimize by stripping the executable). (Still, a "hello world" executable comes out to about 200K on my machine.) If you want to execute a portion of your program before dumping, use the dump operator instead. Note: availability of undump is platform specific and may not be available for a specific port of Perl.
Working hypothesis and confirmation
Perl’s argument processing sees the entire chunk as a single cluster of options because it begins with a dash. The -i option consumes the next word (enext), as we can see in the implementation for -i processing.
case 'i':
Safefree(PL_inplace);
[Cygwin-specific code elided -geb]
{
const char * const start = ++s;
while (*s && !isSPACE(*s))
++s;
PL_inplace = savepvn(start, s - start);
}
if (*s) {
++s;
if (*s == '-') /* Additional switches on #! line. */
s++;
}
return s;
For the backup file’s extension, the code above from perl.c consumes up to the first whitespace character or end-of-string, whichever is first. If characters remain, the first must be whitespace, then skip it, and if the next is a dash then skip it also. In Perl, you might write this logic as
if ($$s =~ s/i(\S+)(?:\s-)//) {
my $extension = $1;
return $extension;
}
Then, all of -u, -n, -l, and -e are valid Perl options, so argument processing eats them and leaves the nonsensical
ss /g/i
as the argument to -e, which perl parses as a series of divisions. But before execution can even begin, the archaic -u causes perl to dump core.
Unintended behavior
An even stranger bit is if you put two spaces between next and unless
$ perl -ie'next unless /g/i'
the program attempts to run. Back in the main option-processing loop we see
case '*':
case ' ':
while( *s == ' ' )
++s;
if (s[0] == '-') /* Additional switches on #! line. */
return s+1;
break;
The extra space terminates option parsing for that argument. Witness:
$ perl -ie'next nonsense -garbage --foo' -e die
Died at -e line 1.
but without the extra space we see
$ perl -ie'next nonsense -garbage --foo' -e die
Unrecognized switch: -onsense -garbage --foo (-h will show valid options).
With an extra space and dash, however,
$ perl -ie'next -unless /g/i'
dump is not supported.
Design motivation
As the comments indicate, the logic is there for the sake of harsh shebang (#!) line constraints, which perl does its best to work around.
Interpreter scripts
An interpreter script is a text file that has execute permission enabled and whose first line is of the form:
#! interpreter [optional-arg]
The interpreter must be a valid pathname for an executable which is not itself a script. If the filename argument of execve specifies an interpreter script, then interpreter will be invoked with the following arguments:
interpreter [optional-arg] filename arg...
where arg... is the series of words pointed to by the argv argument of execve.
For portable use, optional-arg should either be absent, or be specified as a single word (i.e., it should not contain white space) …
Three things to know:
'-x y' means -xy to Perl (for some arbitrary options "x" and "y").
-xy, as common for unix tools, is a "bundle" representing -x -y.
-i, like -e absorbs the rest of the argument. Unlike -e, it considers a space to be the end of the argument (as per #1 above).
That means
-ie'next unless /g/i'
which is just a fancy way of writing
'-ienext unless /g/i'
unbundles to
-ienext -u -n -l '-ess /g/i'
^^^^^ ^^^^^^^
---------- ----------
val for -i val for -e
perlrun documents -u as:
This switch causes Perl to dump core after compiling your program. You can then in theory take this core dump and turn it into an executable file by using the undump program (not supplied). This speeds startup at the expense of some disk space (which you can minimize by stripping the executable). (Still, a "hello world" executable comes out to about 200K on my machine.) If you want to execute a portion of your program before dumping, use the dump() operator instead. Note: availability of undump is platform specific and may not be available for a specific port of Perl.
I am unable to evaluate 'modern Perl' code inside the Perl debugger. It works OK when debugging the code in a file, but not from the prompt.
Minimal example:
# Activating 5-10 features with -E (it works)
$ perl -E 'say "x"'
x
# Calling the debugger with -E
# It works for infile code, but for prompt line code...
$ perl -dEbug Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.33
DB say "x"
String found where operator expected at (eval 16)[/local-perl/lib/5.12.1/perl5db.pl:638] line 2, near "say "x""
at (eval 16)[/local-perl/lib/5.12.1/perl5db.pl:638] line 2
eval '($#, $!, $^E, $,, $/, $\\, $^W) = #saved;package main; $^D = $^D | $DB::db_stop;say "x";
(Note: the same happens with "use feature ':5.10'".)
Am I missing something?
I found a reference to the issue here, but it's about a year old. However, the relevant portion of the Perl source hasn't changed since and can be seen here. Essentially, if you take a look at toke.c in the Perl source, you see the following:
if (PL_perldb) {
/* Generate a string of Perl code to load the debugger.
* If PERL5DB is set, it will return the contents of that,
* otherwise a compile-time require of perl5db.pl. */
const char * const pdb = PerlEnv_getenv("PERL5DB");
...
}
...
if (PL_minus_E)
sv_catpvs(PL_linestr,
"use feature ':5." STRINGIFY(PERL_VERSION) "';");
Basically, the debugger is loaded before the -E flag is processed, so the features aren't yet enabled when the debugger gets loaded. The gist of this is that you can't currently use -E with the -d command. If you want to use say, switch, or any other feature from the debug prompt, you have to do it like this:
DB<1> use feature 'say'; say "x"
x
The closest I've seen to a solution is:
copy perl5db.pl from your PERL5LIB to either somewhere in PERL5LIB or the current directory, with a different name, say myperl5db.pl
2. Edit myperl5db.pl to have use feature ':5.10'; (or just 'state', or just 'say') on the first line.
3. Set the environment variable PERL5DB to "BEGIN { require 'myperl5db.pl' }"
Which I found at PerlMonks.
I find a lot of Perl one-liners online. Sometimes I want to convert these one-liners into a script, because otherwise I'll forget the syntax of the one-liner.
For example, I'm using the following command (from nagios.com):
tail -f /var/log/nagios/nagios.log | perl -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'
I'd to replace it with something like this:
tail -f /var/log/nagios/nagios.log | ~/bin/nagiostime.pl
However, I can't figure out the best way to quickly throw this stuff into a script. Does anyone have a quick way to throw these one-liners into a Bash or Perl script?
You can convert any Perl one-liner into a full script by passing it through the B::Deparse compiler backend that generates Perl source code:
perl -MO=Deparse -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'
outputs:
LINE: while (defined($_ = <ARGV>)) {
s/(\d+)/localtime($1);/e;
}
continue {
print $_;
}
The advantage of this approach over decoding the command line flags manually is that this is exactly the way Perl interprets your script, so there is no guesswork. B::Deparse is a core module, so there is nothing to install.
Take a look at perlrun:
-p
causes Perl to assume the following loop around your program, which makes it iterate over filename arguments somewhat like sed:
LINE:
while (<>) {
... # your program goes here
} continue {
print or die "-p destination: $!\n";
}
If a file named by an argument cannot be opened for some reason, Perl warns you about it, and moves on to the next file. Note that the lines are printed automatically. An error occurring during printing is treated as fatal. To suppress printing use the -n switch. A -p overrides a -n switch.
BEGIN and END blocks may be used to capture control before or after the implicit loop, just as in awk.
So, simply take this chunk of code, insertyour code at the "# your program goes here" line, and viola, your script is ready!
Thus, it would be:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; # or use 5.012 if you've got newer perls
while (<>) {
s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e
} continue {
print or die "-p destination: $!\n";
}
That one's really easy to store in a script!
#! /usr/bin/perl -p
s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e
The -e option introduces Perl code to be executed—which you might think of as a script on the command line—so drop it and stick the code in the body. Leave -p in the shebang (#!) line.
In general, it's safest to stick to at most one "clump" of options in the shebang line. If you need more, you could always throw their equivalents inside a BEGIN {} block.
Don't forget chmod +x ~/bin/nagiostime.pl
You could get a little fancier and embed the tail part too:
#! /usr/bin/perl -p
BEGIN {
die "Usage: $0 [ nagios-log ]\n" if #ARGV > 1;
my $log = #ARGV ? shift : "/var/log/nagios/nagios.log";
#ARGV = ("tail -f '$log' |");
}
s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e
This works because the code written for you by -p uses Perl's "magic" (2-argument) open that processes pipes specially.
With no arguments, it transforms nagios.log, but you can also specify a different log file, e.g.,
$ ~/bin/nagiostime.pl /tmp/other-nagios.log
Robert has the "real" answer above, but it's not very practical. The -p switch does a bit of magic, and other options have even more magic (e.g. check out the logic behind the -i flag). In practice, I'd simply just make a bash alias/function to wrap around the oneliner, rather than convert it to a script.
Alternatively, here's your oneliner as a script: :)
#!/usr/bin/bash
# takes any number of arguments: the filenames to pipe to the perl filter
tail -f $# | perl -pe 's/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e'
There are some good answers here if you want to keep the one-liner-turned-script around and possibly even expand upon it, but the simplest thing that could possibly work is just:
#!/usr/bin/perl -p
s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e
Perl will recognize parameters on the hashbang line of the script, so instead of writing out the loop in full, you can just continue to do the implicit loop with -p.
But writing the loop explicitly and using -w and "use strict;" are good if plan to use it as a starting point for writing a longer script.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
while(<>) {
s/(\d+)/localtime($1)/e;
print;
}
The while loop and the print is what -p does automatically for you.