[Melbourne-pm] Perl best practices: script actions based on a command line argument

Daniel Pittman daniel at rimspace.net
Thu Jan 31 21:41:48 PST 2008


G'day.

I semi-regularly end up writing small scripts that do little jobs for
myself, such as performing various DNS checks, interfacing to billing
systems and the like.

Generally these end up as a single script that handles half a dozen
closely related but mostly independent functions, such as:

     dns mx ...         # check MX details for a domain
     dns ns ...         # check NS details for a domain

I typically implement this as a bunch of supporting code and libraries,
and a command wrapper that read the first command line argument and
dispatches to a function based on it.

This being Perl there are a lot of ways to do that, all of which are
a bit ugly (in my opinion), such as a cascade of if ($blah eq 'foo')
statements or a hash full of function refs...


So, what is the general consensus on the best way to do this -- what is
the nicest way to dispatch to the various command handlers based on a
command line argument?

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Daniel Pittman <daniel at cybersource.com.au>           Phone: 03 9428 6922
1/130-132 Stawell St, Richmond              Web: http://www.cyber.com.au
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company


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