Subject: Re: Question for perl gurus: what creates /bin/{HEAD|GET|POST}?
From: "Gerrit P. Haase" <[email-masked]>
To: Igor Pechtchanski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 17:46:39 +0200

Igor schrieb:

> A question for the perl gurus:

> I noticed that I have 3 files in /bin: HEAD, GET, and POST.  These are
> interfaces to the LWP library.  Does anyone know what creates them?
> Looking at the creation times, the most likely culprit is the CPAN perl
> module, but I'd like to confirm that.

These are part of LWP (libwww) and were installed with the LWP module.

> The reason I'm concerned about it is that the name HEAD clashes with
> /bin/head.exe, and results in weird-looking problems that took me a while
> to track down (i.e. 'ls|head' says 'head: command not found' -- I have
> check_case:strict; I suspect that without it users will simply get the
> wrong output).  This is most likely Cygwin-specific, as other OSs will
> easily distinguish between head and HEAD.

Only possibility to have HEAD and head.exe is to use CYGWIN=check_case:strict
or remove one of them.

> A suggestion/request to the perl maintainer: change the names of HEAD,
> GET, and POST to LWP-HEAD, LWP-GET, and LWP-POST...  For consistency, this
> should probably be done in the main perl development branch, anyway,
> rather than in the Cygwin port...  Does this sound very unreasonable?

The LWP module isn't part of the Cygwin perl distribution.  If you
install LWP you are asked if you want to install these shortcuts
This was included in the LWP setup because of the problems with Cygwin
and other case insensitive platforms.

You may try to convince the LWP maintainer to include an additional
option to get the same shortcuts with a userdefined name instead of
'get them or leave them' as it is now. (mailto: libwww at perl.org)

Gerrit
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