Shell Programming and Scripting

Thanks cbkihong. I suppose you are referring to modules that are written in PERL alone and could you explain how to use @INC option. Assuming the following was my source directory.

/home/mmt1234/PERL/src/

and I have the XML::XPATH modules in the current folder, how would I

1) include the local modules in the program in the src folder and
2) use the @INC option. Thanks Jerardfjay

use the "use lib" pragma at the top of your script. Point to where the modules will be found, excluding the path segment corresponding to the package name.

I am working on a Windows machine right now, so for illustration I will use Windows-style paths but you can just likewise translate to Unix paths.

I extracted the .pm files in the archive to C:\temp\XML\. The folder structure should be preserved. So there is a C:\temp\XML\XPath.pm and some other modules in C:\temp\XML\XPath\. Here, I just put

use lib 'C:\\temp';

in my test script then it will be able to find the module when I do a

use XML::XPath;

"use lib" will modify @INC to include the new module path information. This is the easiest way to "install" a module when the sysadmin refuses to install custom modules (e.g. free or even some paid CGI hosts will not do this). I guess if you have shell access and can pass some parameters to the Makefile to modify the output directory, you may be able to install compiled modules in private too, though I have not tried this out myself.