[SOLVED] Can Storable store to the DATA filehandle?

Can Storable store to the DATA filehandle?

I was curious if using Storable's store_fd and fd_retrieve would allow me to store a data structure into a program's own DATA filehandle. I realize this isn't Best Practice, I'm just curious if it'd work, my quick attempts to try it don't seem to work.

Solution

I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, but you can fake it. You should try to avoid that though.

Just for giggles, you could open a filehandle, read lines from $0 and print them until you get to __DATA__, then add your new __DATA__ section. The trick is then to rename your new file to become $0, perhaps by an exec if your system locks the file while the program is running:

#!perl

my $mode = (stat($0))[2] & 07777;

open my($fh), '<', $0 or die "I can't open me! $!\n";
open my($new), '>', "$0.new" or die "I can't open you! $!\n";
eval { chmod( $mode, $new ) } or warn "Couldn't set permissions: $@\n";

while( <$fh> )
    {
    last if /^__DATA__$/;
    print { $new } $_;
    }

print "I am $$\n";
print { $new } "__DATA__\n", join '|', $$, time, (stat($0))[1];

rename( "$0.new", $0 )

__DATA__
64574|1265415126|8843292