annoying things learned about perl today
App::Cmd::Tester lets you test that an App::Cmd program output the right things to standard error and standard out, and did so in the right order. It does stuff Test::Output can do, but also just a bit more.
I had a need to generalize this earlier today, and ran into a bunch of obnoxious problems. Most of these center around the “it’s hard to get synchronized but separate output from a spawned program’s stderr and stdout” problem. Others were less well-known, at least to me.
For example, I was doing something like this:
tie my $scalar, 'Tie::Class', { common => \$string, private => \$other };
I had a number of things like this, and I thought I’d be able to write:
tie my $scalar, $object->tie_args;
This didn’t work, though, because the tie_args method gets called in scalar
context, so it evaluated to the hash reference, which of course had no
TIESCALAR method.
Instead, I ended up doing something possibly better anyway:
tie my $scalar, $object, $argument;
The object has a TIESCALAR method that proxies to the correct class with the
correct arguments. I’m pretty happy with that.
The other problem is this:
tie my $scalar, 'Some::Tie';
open my $fh, '>', \$scalar or die "failed to open ref: $!";
print $fh "this is a test" or die "failed to print: $!;
This code just doesn’t do what I mean. It doesn’t raise any exceptions, but
the STORE method is never called on the tie. This seems, to me, like a bug
in perl. I’ll need to investigate.
The code I was working on has been uploaded as IO::TieCombine.