TL;DR

I want to tack a new meaning to the Italian word Modulabile.

Modulabile is an Italian word that more or less means adjustable. I’d like to attach a new meaning in a Perl context, though, and in particular of a module that can be easily used in a one-liner.

We already know about Modulinos: a Perl module that doubles down as an executable, if needed.

Now, with a Modulabile I’d like to do something much in that spirit, but going a bit farther. Where modulinos are normally created as an evolution from programs to make them more easily testable, with a Modulabile I’d like to add an easy way to use a module from the command line, or at least its most obvious functionality.

The concept is by no means new or invented by me. The most egregious example that I personally know of is the ojo module, that allows placing a catch -Mojo command line option to import a bunch of one-letter-long functions to do all sorts of wonders with Mojolicious. From the SYNOPSIS:

$ perl -Mojo -E 'say g("mojolicious.org")->dom->at("title")->text'

This way of having modules that can be also easily called as programs without the need to know where they have been installed fascinates me. It make the module somehow able to be run, hence the name by merging the two words.

As an example, in recent module Validate::CodiceFiscale I added this function, which can also be imported:

sub r (@args) {
   @args = @ARGV unless @args;
   my $i = 0;
   my $n = 0;
   for my $cf (@ARGV) {
      if (my $errors = validate_cf($cf)) {
         say "$i not ok - " . join(', ', $errors->@*);
         ++$n;
      }
      else {
         say "$i ok - $cf";
      }
      ++$i;
   } ## end for my $cf (@ARGV)
   return $n ? 1 : 0;
} ## end sub r

The short name makes it easy to import it from the command line: just use option -M with the addition of two characters, i.e. -MValidate::CodiceFiscale=r.

The way it takes arguments, defaulting to what comes from the command line itself, makes it extremely easy to run the function. All in all, it’s possible to do validation of a few strings on the command line like this:

perl -MValidate::CodiceFiscale=r -er "$string1" "$string2" ...

I was a bit surprised that the -er part works, I initially thought I would have had to put it like this:

perl -M... -e 'r()' ...

or something similar. I quickly discovered that, having imported function r, I could do away with the round parentheses and quotation marks, so this would work as well:

perl -M... -e r ...

Then I just tried to remove the space, and it worked too!

There are many times when the functions in a module are better imported and used in a full program; other times, though, they can come handy from the command line, so why not enrich our module and make it a… modulabile?

Cheers!