[San-Diego-pm] Detect invocation method?

Jarrod Overson jsoverson at gmail.com
Fri Dec 10 12:15:58 PST 2010


A quick test on a windows machine with strawberry perl shows that the
'PROMPT' environment variable gets set when run by the command line but
doesn't when double clicking (with windows set to open a pl file via the
perl.exe directly)

I'm not sure how reliable that is across different system configurations,
but might be a lead worth following.


2010/12/10 Reuben Settergren <ruberad at gmail.com>

> Hi Mongers,
>
> I'm writing some simple scripts for some very command-line-phobic users; or
> let's just say they would prefer a mousy solution over a typey solution.
>
> I've already made the script do useful things with no arguments, so they
> can keep the script on their desktop, paste it into any directory and
> double-click it, and then the script will discover input files in that
> directory with glob() and do its thing.
>
> I've also come up with some clever (but probably not original) techniques
> like checking the special variable $0 (that's a zero) for _test or _verbose,
> so I can tell if they changed the filename, and then I can behave as if they
> had run from the command line with the equivalent switches, and hold up the
> cmd window at the end with "Press <enter> to close this window".
>
> But I'm looking for ways to make it even more idiot-proof.
>
> Does anybody know of a way that I can tell whether my script was invoked
> from the command-line or by double-clicking? (other than checking $0 and
> trusting that the user will never double-click the script meant for
> command-line invocation?)
>
> Is there any way to package up a perl script (or .bat?) such that input
> file(s) can be selected with the mouse, and dragged into the icon for the
> script, so that the script would then run with the (full?) paths to the
> selected files as its command-line arguments? (This is a mac paradigm,
> right? I've never seen this on windoze or unix)
>
> Also open to other clever ideas you may have to offer...
>
> thx,
>
> r
>
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> San-Diego-pm at pm.org
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