Hacking a script (makemenu.pl)

Hi. Infrequent hacker here.

(Originally posted to alt.comp.lang.perl. Not much happening over there!)

I've spent the last two days trying to hack H. Churchyard's makemenu.pl so
it will work on my WinME PC. I've got lots of hair but I won't have for
long.

If there is anyone out there that knows this script, I think I might learn
quite a bit by hacking my way thru this one but I could sure use some help.

I'm not looking for a working script or someone to do it for me. I'd just
like to understand what's going on here and why I am having such a tough
time getting very far with this. I'm using Activestate's perl, v5.8.6 built
for MSWin32-x86-multi-thread.

There are two "eval" lines here...

eval "exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0 $*" if $running_under_some_shell;

and...

eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^(title=|toc=|dirprefix=)(.*)/ &&
shift;

The first is unnecessary (I think) and the second is extracting info from
the command line.

I don't know how advanced this script might be but it seems to be using
lot's of tricks that aren't taught in "Learning Perl on Win32 Systems". ;^)

Anyway, if there is someone that can spare the time to share some of their
knowledge with me, I'd be grateful.

I would attempt to contact the author of this script if I knew how. I've
used it "as is" on Linux and it works quite well for what I am wanting to
do.

Here's the error I get...

F:\Programming\Perl\HTML Menu Project>perl -d test2.pl title="My Menu" toc=1
*.htm > My_Menu.htm
Win32::OLE operating in debugging mode: _Unique => 1
Can't open *.htm: No such file or directory at test2.pl line 12.

And I have several small HTML files with the ".htm" extension in this
directory.

I've stripped this script down to what I think is the barest essentials for
testing. I don't expect this fragment to do anything I'm just trying to get
over a hump. I hit the "while (<>)" line and I get nothing. Here's what I
have at this time...

$title = ''; $toc = 0; $dirprefix = '';
eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^(title=|toc=|dirprefix=)(.*)/ &&
shift;
$[ = 1; # set array base to 1
$\ = "\n"; # set output record separator
foreach $X (@ARGV) {
if ($X =~ /^[^=]+=/) {
print STDERR "Apparent misspelled or badly-placed command-line
option $\
&";
print STDERR "Attempting to continue anyway...";}}
$accum = ''; $haccum = '';
$xRS = $/;
#
while (<>) {
if ($_ =~ /$xRS$/o) {chop;} # strip record separator
if (($.-$FNRbase) == 1) {
if ($. == 1) {
if (!$title) {
$title = 'Menu for HTML files';}
print "<html><head><title>$title</title></head>";
print "<body><h1>$title</h1><hr><ul>";}
else {
if ($toc) {
&liout();}}
$hlevel = 0;}

};

Thanks in advance.

Raffles


.

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