=head1 README Though ClearCase::Argv is itself quite small, it represents the I<"Grand Unification"> of some of my other ClearCase-related modules. The module itself is fully documented in the standard POD format; this is an accompanying overview and chronology. =head1 SUMMARY OF FEATURES =over 4 =item * Interoperability/Portability Using B can greatly enhance portability of scripts between UNIX and Windows by providing versions of I, I, and I (aka backquotes) which behave the same on Windows as on UNIX. Ok, almost the same. This includes automatically quoting arguments to protect them from the C shell, automatically converting /-separated pathnames to \, etc. This can keep a lot of hair out of your script. =item * Optional Co-Process for Speed For any script uses ClearCase::Argv, the 'ipc_cleartool' class method ClearCase::Argv->ipc_cleartool; will start B as an B co-process and arrange to send all subsequent system/exec/qx commands to it instead of forking a new child process each time. This can speed up scripts by anywhere between 2 and 10 times. =item * Convenience Features Many convenience features are provided by the replacement system/exec/qx functions. These include: 1. 'autochomp' mode (chomps lines automatically, natch) 2. 'autofail' mode (exit on child process failure) 3. 'noexec' mode (print cmds without executing, like make -n) 4. 'xargs' mode (breaks long cmd lines up to avoid system limits) plus a few more. =item * No Major Investment It's easy to convert an existing script to use ClearCase::Argv or back. Just change all instances of backquotes to C and remove any existing Win32-porting hackery. To go back to native style, either change C to C (I), or add a line like: sub qv { qx(@_) } And remove the 'use ClearCase::Argv' line of course. =item * Option Processing There's a great deal of option-processing power inherited from the base class, much more in fact than most users will care about. =back =head1 CHRONOLOGY =head2 IPC::ClearTool I wrote B to manage B as a co-process for reasons of speed. I.e. instead of doing a fork/exec for each B command it forks just one process in the background and sends all B commands down to it. This is much (generally between 2 and 10 times) faster. Unfortunately B suffered from a few paradigmatic flaws: =over 4 =item * It didn't work on Windows, where there's no such thing as a fork or a true child process. =item * The interface was/is strange and a little clunky. Not too surprising considering that UNIX requires 3 different API's C<(system, exec, and backquotes)> to handle child processes; jamming all that functionality into one API is awkward. =item * Due to the above, any script written to the B API was non-portable to Windows and hard to convert back to traditional system/exec/qx. Thus converting an existing tool to it required a substantial commitment of time, and using it at all meant a substantial commitment of faith. =back The Windows port was accomplished by calling into the ClearCase Automation Library, a COM interface first available in ClearCase 3.2.1. But the other issues remained, until ... =head2 Argv I also have a ClearCase/Perl module called B. This one's a wrapper that runs on top of B to extend its functionality and/or allow site policies to be established at the wrapper level. But this one also suffers an ugly programming model (do we sense a trend here?). In particular it's necessary to do lots of shifting, grepping, splicing, and quoting of @ARGV leading to extremely spaghetti-like code in places, especially when you throw in the need for UNIX/Windows portability and different shell-quoting rules. So extensions written to the B "API" tend to be a nest of ifdefs (wrong language, I know). So I started out to rewrite C. The first step was to write a support module (eventually called B) to hide all the @ARGV machinations under an OO interface. It has plenty of its own docs so I won't go into it here, but suffice it to say it provides a lot of ways to manipulate an arg vector. In fact it provides much more parsing power than almost anyone would ever need, so although this is its original reason for existence it's the least interesting to most. B also has I, i.e. you can execute your Argv object via C<$obj->system()> or C<$obj->qx()>. Handling platform differences (quoting, pathname separators, etc.) in B seemed like a natural extension, so I added that. This lead to convenience methods like C<$obj->autochomp> (should be obvious) and C<$obj->qxargs> (implements xargs-like behavior to ensure that system limits aren't exceeded), etc. At this point I realized that though the parsing features had a small constituency, the portability abstraction of the I might be of interest to many more users. So in order to make that more accessible I added a B, allowing the single line use Argv qw(system exec qv); to overrride the Perl builtins with Argv's relatively platform- independent versions. Note: I is used because Perl doesn't allow C, which is itself a synonym for backquotes, to be overridden. Bottom line, adding the above line - plus converting C<`cmd`> to C - buys a lot of UNIX/Win32 portability. As of this writing I haven't ever gotten around to rewriting C to use B, but I've used B to write lots of other portable Perl code. =head2 ClearCase::Argv Note that B itself has nothing to do with ClearCase. So I made a tiny subclass of B to tune it for use with B, since I write a lot of Perl/ClearCase code. Originally, B simply extended B to assume a leading word "cleartool". Thus, while Argv->new('ls', -l'); represents an C<"ls -l"> command, ClearCase::Argv->new('ls', -l'); would run C<"cleartool ls -l">, and it understands that the 'program' part of the command line is "cleartool ci" (or more properly qw(cleartool ci)). The I of I is exposed through B, and it's also extended to support methods called B which automatically prepend 'cleartool'. E.g.: my @views = ccqx(lsview -s); Attributes can be set through the functional interface like this: my @views = ccqx({autochomp=>1}, lsview -s); =head1 GRAND UNIFICATION Then one day I got an email question from Mark Scandariato of Lucent: Do you have any plan to use IPC-ClearTool within ClearCase-Ct? (I'd hate to duplicate anything already underway.) I replied that I didn't but it got me to thinking about whether C could be taught to send its commands to a co-process. A few days later I got a chance to play with it and it came together with surprising ease! This is the big connection that makes it all pretty neat, IMHO, since you get improved speed, portability, and ease of use in one package. Without having to make a major commitment of rewriting code. =head1 RELEASE STATE ClearCase::Argv is still considered in "beta" state, which I consider to mean that it works pretty well but I reserve the right to make interface changes.