Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, Second Edition

Chapter 10. Perl

As far as Perl is concerned, Mac OS X is just another Unix. But there are some niceties and some quirks that make things a little different from the developer’s perspective. Mac OS X’s version of Apache also includes mod_perl, which allows you to embed Perl inside the Apache web server. This is described in Section 13.4.3 of Chapter 13.

Perl for Mac OS X Geeks

The following sections list a few of the extras that either come with Mac OS X or can be easily installed.

Mac::Carbon

This module comes by way of MacPerl (http://www.macperl.org), a distribution of Perl for Mac OS 9 and earlier. Mac::Carbon (available from the Download link on the MacPerl web site) gives Perl programmers access to the Carbon APIs. Its test suite is great; make sure you have your speaker volume turned up when you run it. One of the many modules included with Mac::Carbon is MacPerl; here’s an example that pops up a dialog box and asks a question:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use MacPerl qw(:all);

$answer = MacPerl::Ask("Tell me how good you thought my poem was.");
if ($answer =~
    /counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor/i) {
  $die_in_the_vacuum_of_space = 1;
}

You can install Mac::Carbon with the CPAN shell, described later in this chapter. After it’s installed, you can read the documentation with perldoc Mac::Carbon.

PerlObjCBridge.pm

This module ships along with Mac OS X, and it gives you a way to call into the Objective-C runtime on Mac OS X. Given an Objective-C call of the form:

Type x ...