Sixteen years ago, a long time ago, in a Perl far, far away, I wrote an article for Inform IT to promote Effective Perl Programming. In Process HTML with a Perl Module, I used HTML::TreeBuilder to change around some HTML. Today I’d do something completely different and much simpler.

For some reason, I had this notion that all of my StackOverflow activity would disappear, which was heightened by StackOverflow being down when I first tried to figure out how to download the data.

I must have written this story somewhere, but I can’t find it. I think this was the first or second year I was casually using Perl. It must have been the first year because I think this was the summer before I officially started grad school, and I had been farmed out as an intern to a national lab.

In working on cpan-security-advisory I often have a problem being behind master because I have GitHub Actions that update files on a schedule so I can release every Sunday. That’s annoying.

My next big problem is hand-editing a YAML file that turns out to be invalid, screwing up everything. I have tests for those, of course, but do I always run them? Of course I don’t.

So, I broke down and created a pre-push hook, but I also needed some extra features. That is, I iterated with Claude, which is much better than I am at bash syntax.

First, I only run this hook when I try to push to GitHub. I also push to at least three other services for redundancy, and I don’t need to run the tests every item. And, even if I do want to do that, I have a bit to store a semaphore under .git that uses the current rev.

Then I run the tests I want, in this case a bunch of Perl files managed by prove. If the tests pass, meaning all the file formats check out, exit with 0, and if they have problems, exit with something that is not zero.

This originally appeared as the StackOverflow answer to “In Perl, how can I find the index of a given value in an array?”

I’m adding another answer since Perl now has the indexed keyword that makes some of this easier when you want the index and value at the same time.