Hey, Gentoo, I'm just attempting to learn a little Perl and write a little Perl program.
I have been experimenting with the Getopt::Long module, which seems to be working fine, but I'm considering Getopt::Tabular instead. So I thought I'd search portage for "Getopt", to see if that is readily provided by Portage, or otherwise which modules are: $ eix -c -C perl Getopt [N] dev-perl/Getopt-ArgvFile (1.11): This module is a simple supplement to other option handling modules. [N] dev-perl/Getopt-Long-Descriptive (~0.083): Getopt::Long with usage text [N] dev-perl/Getopt-Mixed (1.10): Getopt::Mixed is used for parsing mixed options [N] dev-perl/MooseX-Getopt (~0.26): A Moose role for processing command line options [N] perl-core/Getopt-Long (2.38): Advanced handling of command line options Found 5 matches. $ Yet none of them, not even the Get::Long package that I've been experimenting with, are installed on my system: $ eix -c -C perl Getopt -I No matches found. $ Can anyone explain, please, why this appears not to be installed? Yet how it's working just fine? It looks like a simpler options parsing module is installed, but not this one: $ locate GetOpt /usr/share/man/man3/Tcl_ChannelGetOptionProc.3.bz2 /usr/share/doc/perl-5.8.8-r8/html/lib/Pod/Perldoc/GetOptsOO.html /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/Pod/Perldoc/GetOptsOO.pm $ Further evidence that Getopt::Long seems to be working on this system is that it's used by get_iplayer, which has been working well on this system for the last 3 weeks or so: $ grep -i Getopt `which get_iplayer` use Getopt::Long; search => [ 1, "search=s", 'Search', '--search <search term>', "GetOpt compliant way of specifying search args"], use Getopt::Long; # Build hash for passing to GetOptions module Getopt::Long::Configure("bundling"); Getopt::Long::Configure("pass_through"); Getopt::Long::Configure("no_pass_through"); return GetOptions(%get_opts); $ get_iplayer can be examined at http://linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/get_iplayer in case I'm misunderstanding its usage. I feel really dumb - there must be something simple & logical that I'm missing here. Stroller.