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Module-Path-0.12
River stage three • 18 direct dependents • 761 total dependents
10 ++
/ Module::Path

NAME

Module::Path - get the full path to a locally installed module

SYNOPSIS

 use Module::Path 'module_path';
 
 $path = module_path('Test::More');
 if (defined($path)) {
   print "Test::More found at $path\n";
 } else {
   print "Danger Will Robinson!\n";
 }

DESCRIPTION

Module::Path provides a single function, module_path(), which will find where a module is installed locally.

It works by looking in all the directories in @INC for an appropriately named file:

  • Foo::Bar becomes Foo/Bar.pm, using the correct directory path separator for your operating system.

  • Iterate over @INC, ignoring any references (see "require" in "perlfunc" if you're surprised to hear that you might find references in @INC).

  • For each directory in @INC, append the partial path (Foo/Bar.pm), again using the correct directory path separator. If the resulting file exists, return this path.

  • If a directory in @INC is a symlink, then we resolve the path, and return a path containing the linked-to directory.

  • If no file was found, return undef.

I wrote this module because I couldn't find an alternative which dealt with the points listed above, and didn't pull in what seemed like too many dependencies to me.

The distribution for Module::Path includes the mpath script, which lets you get the path for a module from the command-line:

 % mpath Module::Path

The module_path() function will also cope if the module name includes .pm; this means you can pass a partial path, such as used as the keys in %INC:

  module_path('Test/More.pm') eq $INC{'Test/More.pm'}

The above is the basis for one of the tests.

BUGS

Obviously this only works where the module you're after has its own .pm file. If a file defines multiple packages, this won't work.

This also won't find any modules that are being loaded in some special way, for example using a code reference in @INC, as described in "require" in "perlfunc".

SEE ALSO

There are a number of other modules on CPAN which provide the same or similar functionality: App::whichpm, Class::Inspector, Module::Data, Module::Filename, Module::Finder, Module::Info, Module::Locate, Module::Mapper, Module::Metadata, Module::Runtime, Module::Util, and Path::ScanINC.

I've written a review of all such modules that I'm aware of:

Module::Path was written to be fast, portable, and have a low number of core-only runtime dependencies. It you only want to look up the path to a module, it's a good choice.

If you want more information, such as the module's version, what functions are provided, etc, then start by looking at Module::Info, Module::Metadata, and Class::Inspector.

The following scripts can also give you the path: perldoc, whichpm.

REPOSITORY

https://github.com/neilbowers/Module-Path

AUTHOR

Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2012 by Neil Bowers <neilb@cpan.org>.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.