About this mini-article series. Each day for 24 days, I will be reviewing a module that parses command-line options (such module is usually under the Getopt::* namespace). First article is here.

Getopt::Modular is a Getopt::Long wrapper that lets you place some command-line options to one or more modules and then lets you combine them as you use the modules. For example:

# Module1.pm use Getopt::Modular; Getopt::Modular->acceptParam( opt1 => { spec => '=s', aliases => ['O'], help => 'This is option one', default => 'foo', validate => sub { ... }, }, opt2 => { ... }, ); # access the parameters somewhere in your code using: if (Getopt::Modular->getOpt('foo')) { ... } 1; # in Module2.pm use Getopt::Modular; Getopt::Modular->acceptParam( opt3 => { ... }, ); 1; # in myapp use Getopt::Modular; use Module1; use Module2; Getopt::Modular->parse_args; # program accepts options opt1, opt2, opt3

As you can see, aside from splitting command-line options over several modules, Getopt::Modular also lets you specify default value, usage/help message strings, and extra validation routine.

Getopt::Modular is written by Darin McBride (DMCBRIDE), first release is in 2008 and last updated in 2014. Currently no other CPAN distributions are using it. But Getopt::Modular inspired another module Getopt::Awesome (written by Pablo Fischer (PFISCHER) in 2009) which continues Getopt::Modular’s basic premise but with an alternative syntax.

The intention is good, to achieve modularity, but it’s modularity at the inappropriate level. If you want your code in a module to be more reusable and flexible (and everybody wants that), you accept parameters. The first attempt for accepting parameters should be function parameters (or if you are building an OO class, class attributes). If that is not suitable, for example if you want to parameterize a more global behavior, you use package variables or perhaps environment variable. Using Getopt::Modular (needlessly) ties the parameters to command-line, when your module might not be command-line-specific. The mapping is perhaps best done at the script level instead of at the modules.

That said, there are surely cases when this module is appropriate, for example if you are building a rather complex CLI application that you split into several modules, where the modules are CLI/application-specific. But even then, you should probably try to make the module not CLI-specific if you can.