Business or programming, I''m not sure, but... I have a perl script that would be of value to a particular business niche. Let''s assume they''re not computer geeks or knowledge with regard to things like perl. This isn''t consulting, so I can''t provide any hands on installation or configuration. I want to use perl, because my code employs a lot of what perl is good at, and would just turn a C veriosn into a headache. The perl program gets the job done, and that''s all the customers really want, in this case, I believe. The problem is the issue of distributing perl scripts to customers. They see the code. But that''s the least of the problem. The bigger problem is making sure they have perl installed. I''m also considering making a C program call the perl code. Anyway, how would someone go about this for success and having it not be difficult?

quote:Original post by Monder
Can''t you get perl compilers that convert perl scripts into proper executables? Then you could possible code a wrapper program in c to run it or something?

Yeah, you can, but from what I''ve read so far, and from my actual experimentation (very little) is they aren''t very refined, meaning they don''t work very well.

Uhm, couldnt you distribute perl with the script and make an installer script (install shield or somesuch) with the C exe, script and if they dont have perl installed install that aswell automatically?

- Zorak - Neat Fella.

At my job we have recently released a product using perl2exe. Of course we ran into a couple corner cases, but with sufficient testing we are confident that it works well. It''s really handy, because you can deliver perl modules with it, then if you need to patch, just deliver a new module in your patch mechanism.

Perl2exe isn''t free, that may be a concern to you.

Hope that helps.

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Interesting quote deleted at request of owner

On a previous project (which has a VB front end), I had a similar situation. I just had a shell command spit out the version to a file. I then checked to see if the version matched what I needed. This not only checked to see if it was installed and set up correctly, but tested the version (which was important for what I was doing).