Absolutely Awesome Perl Modules: Cwd

It's the libraries that make a language. It's nice to have cool ways to do loops and such, but if the tool does the task you need it to do, that's what pays the bills.

This is one I've found very useful. Cwd gives you your current working directory with getcwd and it also takes a relative path or and gives you the absolute path, with abs_path.

This is a small script that sends an image path to gconftool to set as the background image. I call it set_background.pl. gconftool is a stickler for absolute paths ('/home/user/Pictures/foo.png', for example), and I could either hack something up to make absolute paths, or I can just use Cwd 'abs_path' ;

#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010 ;
use strict ;
use warnings ;
use Cwd 'abs_path' ;
use IO::Interactive qw{ interactive } ;

my $command = join ' ' ,
    qw{gconftool -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename} ;

my $img = shift @ARGV ;
my $bg  = abs_path $img ;

say { interactive } $bg ;
say qx{$command $bg} ;

IO::Interactive is simlarly cool, but we'll get into that later.