[thelist] Configuring Perl on NT/IIS4.0

Ron White writes:
 > Got a suggestion from the MJ list to use ActiveStatePerl,
 > www.activestate.com, worked like a charm. 6 meg DL and just click through
 > and it takes care O' bidniz....

you were building and installing on windows yourself? you're a braver man than I. Gotta agree, activestate's done some fine work.

- dwayne

<tip type="perl">

I don't write two scripts without using this subroutine, so thought someone else might find it usefull. It takes one or more filenames as a parameter, slurps up the contents and returns a referernce (or list of references) to them. The funky bit is using local on $/ (the record seperation variable) to temporarily undef it, meaning no record seperation, which means when you do:

	$slurps[$i] = <FH>;

you get the whole file pointed to by the file handle, rather than just one line.

#------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Function:    grabFiles
# Description: sucks whole files into an array
# Parameters:  file(s) to slurp
# Returns:     reference to scalar or array with files, undef on fail
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
sub grabFiles {

    my (@files) = @_;
    my ($i, @slurps);

    # delimiters? we don't need no stinkin' delimiters.
    local $/ = undef;

    $i=0;
    for my $file(@files) {

	open (FH, $file) or return undef;
	$slurps[$i] = <FH>;
	close (FH);
	$i++;

    }

    wantarray ? return \@slurps : return \$slurps[0];
}
# end grabFiles

</tip>