Running PerlApp to Convert *.pl to *.exe

Perl Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Converting Perl Script to Executable Binary

∟Running PerlApp to Convert *.pl to *.exe

This section provides a tutorial example of running PerlApp from ActiveStat to convert a sample Perl script, DirGrep.pl, to Windows executable binary, DirGrep.exe.

Running PerlApp to convert a Perl script to an executable program is simple. Let's take my DirGrep.pl as an example:

#- DirGrep.pl
#- Copyright (c) HerongYang.com. All Rights Reserved.
#
   ($expression, $dir) = @ARGV;
   die "Missing regular expression.\n" unless $expression;
   $dir = "." unless $dir;
   $fileCount = 0;
   $matchCount = 0;
   $textCount = 0;
   $otherCount = 0;
   &loopDir($dir);
   print "Number of matched lines = $matchCount\n";
   print "Number of files with matched lines = $fileCount\n";
   print "Number of text files searched = $textCount\n";
   print "Number of other files not searched = $otherCount\n";
   exit;
sub loopDir {
   local($dir) = @_;
   local(*DIR);
   opendir(DIR, $dir) || die "Cannot open $dir\n";
   while ($f=readdir(DIR)) {
      next if ($f eq "." || $f eq "..");
      $f = "$dir\\$f";
      if (-d $f) {
         &loopDir($f);
      } elsif (-T $f) {
         $textCount++;
         if ($n=&fileGrep($f)) {
            $matchCount += $n;
            $fileCount++;
         }
      } else {
         $otherCount++;
      }
   }
   closedir(DIR);
}
sub fileGrep{
   local($file) = @_;
   open(IN, "< $file");
   $n = 0;
   $l = 0;
   while(<IN>) {
      $l++;
      if (/$expression/i) {
         $n++;
         print "$file, line $l\n" ;
         print;
         print "\n";
      }
   }
   close(IN);
   return $n;
}

Run the following commands to convert it into a Windows executable program and test it:

herong> \pdk\bin\perlapp DirGrep.pl

PerlApp 6.0.1 build 138990
...
* WARNING: Applications generated by this evaluation copy of PerlApp
*          will stop working after the end of the evaluation period.
...
Created 'DirGrep.exe'

herong\src> DirGrep binary ..

...
..\htm\binary.html, line 18
<li>How to open files for input in binary mode.

..\htm\binary.html, line 20
<li>How to open files for output in binary mode.
...

As you can see from the output, the converted program DirGrep.exe works nicely. Now I can pass my DirGrep tool to anyone who is using Windows system without Perl installed.