Archive for February 26th, 2009
Fun with ctags

A while back I’d created a Perl module to hold two “odds & ends” subroutines that I used in a lot of my programs. I gave it the unfortunate name of “Misc.pm”. Of course, it lived up to its name & grew over time to contain many more functions; I should have just named it JunkDrawer.pm and been done with it. I decided it was time for a cleanup, and I split everything out into more appropriately-named modules. But then I had the problem of what to do with existing programs that referenced Misc.pm. I could have just loaded all the new modules, but that seemed messy. I had to have a way to figure out which functions each program used & thus track them back to their shiny new module. jshirley suggested I try ctags.
(more…)