Absolutely Awesome Perl Modules: IO::Interactive

I'm reinstalling on another box and have a few moments to knock this out.

Say you have a batch job that does lots and lots and lots of stuff overnight, or even several times an hour. You want to know what's going on with it when you're working on it, so you add print or say statements all over.

say &do( $this ) ;
say &do( $that ) ;
say &do( $the_other_thing ) ;

And it emails you all the time, giving you status updates you don't need. So, you change it.

$debug and say &do( $this ) ;
$debug and say &do( $that ) ;
$debug and say &do( $the_other_thing ) ;

And you have to remember to set the $debug flag for testing.

Along comes IO::Interactive

use IO::Interactive { interactive } ;
say { interactive } &do( $this ) ;
say { interactive } &do( $that ) ;
say { interactive } &do( $the_other_thing ) ;

Now, it can tell if you're running interactively or not, and suppress your prints (by giving a non-writing file handle) when you don't want to print. Absolutely awesome.