Running perl files from a text file - perl

Question

There're multiple perl scripts that is ran from CYGWIN terminal. An example is,
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl JSmith -i userInfo.adb -o JSmith.txt
The above is an example. Were based on input parameter JSmith, it reads a db file, generate an ID and output that to a text file.
Now these perl scripts running on the CYGWIN keeps growing and it's added to a text file like shown below,
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl JSmith -i userInfo.adb -o JSmith.txt
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl PTesk -i userInfo.adb -o PTesk.txt
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl CMorris -i userInfo.adb -o CMorris.txt
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl JLawrence -i userInfo.adb -o JLawrence.txt
$ perl IdGeneratorTool.pl TCruise -i userInfo.adb -o TCruise.txt
...
....
......
.......
.........
And the list keeps growing.
I would like to know whether there's a way to execute all these perl scripts which are in a text file in one go.
I'm new to perl and doesn't have much idea as to what are the options.
An ideal scenario might be, a tool where i can open this text file and click a execute button and then it executes all the scripts and output multiple *.txt files into the same directory.
Or maybe a simple perl script that can do it.

Answer 1

Put them into a file makeall (or whatever you want to call it.
Put as a first line #!/bin/bash into the file
In cygwin enter chmod +x makeall
in cygwin enter ./makeall
With this you've created a bash script which'll do all your calls of the perl script.
Another option would to just put all the user information into a csv file and read that one in order to call your script.
WAIT! Even easier!
Put into the makeall script this:
#!/bin/bash
for user in \
JSmith \
PTesk \
CMorris \
JLawrence \
TCruise \
; do
perl IdGeneratorTool.pl "$user" -i userInfo.adb -o "$user".txt
done
Now you just need to add any additional user the same way I did for your examples.

Answer 2

Without seeing the source for IdGeneratorTool.pl it's hard to give any specific advice; but it is generally not hard to turn something like
do_stuff($ARGV[0], $opt_i, $opt_o);
into
while (<>) {
chomp;
$user, $adb, $outputfile = split('\t');
do_stuff($user, $adb, $outputfile);
}
to read the input from a tab-delimited file instead of from command-line arguments.

Answer 3

You can create text file with list of users (one per line) for example user_list.txt
JSmith
PTesk
CMorris
JLawrence
TCruise
Then create bash script process_list.sh with following content in same directory
#!/bin/bash
for user in `cat user_list.txt`
do
perl IdGeneratorTool.pl $user -i userInfo.adb -o ${user}.txt
done
Now make bash script executable chmod +x process_list.sh and it is ready for execution.
Once you need to add new user edit user_list.txt to add one more line into the file.
Polar Bear