Firstly, HI to everyone - and thanks to the gurus for all the good advice
for us beginners :)
Now, the problem.
I was working on a project and realized that if I created a simple shell
program I could make things easier for myself. However, when I started to
code I found myself with a dilemma:
The program has to behave like two different programs depending on how it
was called. i.e. it has to know what the instruction used to start it was -
ignoring command-line parameters and such like. It would have two
instructions for starting it, one the name of the program, the other a link
to the same program but using a different name.
For example, from the command-line I could run the program by typing
[linux]# A -params OR
[linux]# B -params
I want to be able to know if the program was started using program name A
or program name B. In pseudo-code:
if (called by A){ do something ....}
elsif (called by B){ do a something else ....}
The program shares and stores the parameters for use with, (as it appears
to the user), either A or B, but both parts of the program can access any
of the parameters - they just act differently depending on the name used to
start the program.
I know that I could write two separate programs but the idea of doing it as
one just seemed less untidy...... plus now I'm not going to be happy until
I find an answer!
I have searched, ok, glanced, you caught me ;), through the perldocs and
the Perl Cookbook and found plenty dealing with capturing parameters passed
to the program and system interaction, but none quite touching on the
problem as I see it.
One solution I was mulling over was to try and get access to the bash
history (i.e. assume the last entry is our program being called) but the
problem is I don't know where or how bash history is stored, nor when the
last instruction is saved - i.e. if it is saved after the program executes
its of no use to the program.
Is there a simple way of doing this? Something like $^O (to get the os),
for example?
Thanks in advance for your help.
