Does a Perl module know where it is installed?

Question

I have started creating a Perl package that contains a default email template.

The MANIFEST looks something like:

SendMyEmail.pm
SendMyEmail/defualt_email.tt

Currently I know where the module (and the template) are - but does the module itself know where on disk it is? So could the module find the default template without my help?

# This is what I would like to do.
package SendMyEmail;
sub new {
    my ($self, $template) = @_;
    $template ||= $dir_of_SendMyEmail .'/SendMyEmail/default_email.tt'; # ??
}

Is there a better way of including a templates text, or a better place to put the template?

Any references to CPAN modules that do something similar would be welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Each perl file has access to the variable __FILE__ which tells it its full path. Something like this should do the trick:

my $DEFAULT_TEMPLATE;
BEGIN {
    $DEFAULT_TEMPLATE = __FILE__;
    $DEFAULT_TEMPLATE =~ s,\.pm$,/default_email.tt,;
}

Still, if all you want is to bundle 'data' files with your modules then take a look at File::ShareDir which provides a way for doing that.