The Mother of All Bizarre tie Tricks

• Best application: Tied filehandle.

        do_something(...);

• And then to your dismay, do_domething prints a lot of blather on the STDOUT

  • And you cannot get it to shut up

  • Moreover, you want the program to examine the error log for diagnostics

• So tie STDOUT:

        { my $output;
          tie *STDOUT => 'TrapOutput', \$output;
          do_something();            # Blessed silence
          untie *STDOUT;
          # Now examine $output
        }

        sub TrapOutput::TIEHANDLE {
          my ($class, $var) = @_;
          bless $var, $class;
        }

        sub TrapOutput::PRINT {
          my ($self, $string) = @_;
          $$self .= $string;
        }

• Final remark: ArrayHashMonster may amaze and delight you

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Copyright © 2003 M. J. Dominus