[MacPerl] Re: pidgin perl

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

At 15:26 -0500 98/08/26, Kurt W. Hirchert wrote:
> Actually, it appears that it may be _good_ pidgen code.  If you are
>writing
> a script to be run by other people, it is generally considered bad form to
> depend on the search path because your script could be broken or
>subverted

You are running with taint checks on, right?
if you don't want the user to subvert the date command, use localtime() :-)

<GRUMBLE>
Five Words:

        Set The Search Path Yourself

You can do this. You will have control.  You do not need to include an
absolute path on every command call.  I do not consider hard-coding the
path on the call itself to be Good Coding Practice (tm).

In my own not-so-humble opinion ;-)

...Sorry, but this one is personal to me.  We have an awful lot of code
here with stuff like:

   $command = "/usr/ucb/cp..."
   $command = "/usr/ucb/mv..."
   $command = "/usr/ucb/cat..."
   $command = "/home/bioinfo/bin/tbl2fasta..."

Guess what; only the last of these, the _non-standard local command_, is
portable unchanged to my Sun Solaris system :-(

Half of this stuff should have been written as native perl; the other half
breaks if we change the location of the local programs.  And guess who gets
called if it breaks...

</GRUMBLE>

> you use absolute command paths rather than depending on the search path
> (unless, of course, you set the path yourself).

see figure 1 :-)

    $ENV{PATH} = "/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin";


To bring this back into a Mac-oriented discussion, how come $ENV{PATH}
under MPW is empty?  MPW has a search path; how do I get at it?
---
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