[MacPerl] a random tip: "the Ur-droplet"

["Sean M. Burke" <sean@misinc.net> (by way of Vicki Brown)]

Once upon a time I did wrote some really handy MacPerl droplets, and left
them on a filesystem that was, I was told, regularly backed up.  But
somehow or other, the filesystem crashed months later, and when the files
were restored, they were missing their resource fork.  Since that's where
the source code is for droplets, I lost a decent amount of work.

So I decided that from then on, I'd have all droplets that exist consist
only of this:

if(-e "$0.plx") {
  do "$0.plx" or die; # propagate any errors.
} else {
  die "Can't find $0.plx";
}

So if I want a droplet that's called "do_stuff_now", I create such a
droplet consisting of just the above code -- and when the droplet is run,
it actually just goes and runs what's in a file called "do_stuff_now.plx",
which is just a normal plaintext file.
And if the filesystem crashes and the backup loses the resource fork, no
big deal -- all those .plx files have all their source code in the data
fork, not the resource fork.  All the droplets would still break, but I
just replace them with a new droplet with the above code in them.
(In truth, I don't /make/ a new droplet every time, I just duplicate an
"Ur-droplet" and put it in whatever directory and with whatever name I
want.)

More generally and importantly, I can then search over the content of those
.plx files in BBEdit or wherever, whereas if the same code were in droplets
(in the resource fork), BBEdit wouldn't be able to see it.

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