Recent content by sparky_dy

How easy is it, in Perl, to have a function which gets called on SIGINT (when you press ctrl+C or just do a normal kill) and does some tidying up -- i.e. writes its results so far to a database and unlinks its pidfile -- before exiting?

Or are there situations when it is preferable to have an excess of one or the other reagent?

I am writing a CGI script in Perl. Unfortunately, it is probably going to take several minutes to execute in practice, and it doesn't need to interact with the user while it's doing its business.. Therefore, I was hoping to be able to have the script fork a subprocess to do the hard stuff and...

I am writing a CGI script in Perl. Unfortunately, it is probably going to take several minutes to execute in practice, and it doesn't need to interact with the user while it's doing its business.. Therefore, I was hoping to be able to have the script fork a subprocess to do the hard stuff and...

In Perl, how can I tell whether STDIN is connected to a terminal?

Is one of these ways of changing the first character of a string to a capital "X" significantly quicker than the other? (1) $foo = "X" . substr $foo, 1; (2) substr $foo, 0, 1 = "X"; (3) $foo =~ s/^./X/; I think the third is most readable, but is it significantly slower than the other two?

H.M. Land Registry went fully computerised in the 2000s, so the paper documents are much less important nowadays than they used to be.

Well, yes, because it's an utterly fallacious argument. The only difficulty is identifying which fallacy it's committing! Premise 2 is unsupported except by the desired conclusion, which makes it begging the question. But there's also a bit of a mid-sentence redefinition going on -- it begins...

Is the syntax of the BSD-derived sed command on as found the Apple Mac different from the GNU sed command as found in Linux and (as gsed) in Solaris? What, if anything, need I be aware of?

One of the arguments against natural origins of life is that even if you admit that the Earth is 4.5 billion year old, that isn't enough time for all the building blocks of life to have come together, one after another, in the correct order. Do Creationists cook their Sunday dinner like this...

I am writing a Perl program which I intend to release as Open Source; and it includes a section which I think is worth separating out as a module. I could put the whole lot in one file; but that would make it harder for other people to reuse the code, and isn't that the whole point of Open...

Can you place a bet on a particular item of clothing becoming fashionable next season? (There doesn't seem to be a gambling section on here.)

I am writing a Perl program which I intend to release as Open Source; and it includes a section which I think is worth separating out as a module. I could put the whole lot in one file; but that would make it harder for other people to reuse the code, and isn't that the whole point of Open...

I have a GTK window in which I want to update certain fields with values read by my script from an external device. When I call Gtk2->Main(), the perl program stops, until some event calls Gtk2->main_quit() and then it continues with the line after. What I want to be able to do is display the...

I have a GTK window in which I want to update certain fields with values read by my script from an external device. When I call Gtk2->Main(), the perl program stops, until some event calls Gtk2->main_quit() and then it continues with the line after. What I want to be able to do is display the...