Thursday, May 27, 2010

Strawberry Perl

Oh, I should caveat one thing. In order to develop perl scripts into a distributable, platform independent, one click executable, I've been using the PAR packager [cpan.org] module for perl. Sometimes it produces slightly bloated .exe's (since it has to bring in all of the relevant code from any external modules and dependencies), but it seems to produce very stable executables on win32 systems.
AutoHotKey or AutoIt are better and they are free unlike Visual Basic.

Mod this up. I've used C++, Java, Perl, Ruby, vbscript, batch, and likely a few more to do this kind of thing in Windows over the years. For something this small I haven't found anything that beats AutoIt. It's so easy to learn and is fantastic for creating small, standalone executables with a GUI on Windows. This task is a perfect fit.