NAME

Term::CallEditor - solicit for data from an external Editor

SYNOPSIS

use Term::CallEditor;

my $fh = solicit('FOO: please replace this text');
die "$Term::CallEditor::errstr\n" unless $fh;

print while <$fh>;

DESCRIPTION

This module calls an external editor with an optional text message and returns what was input as a file handle. By default, the EDITOR environment variable will be used, otherwise vi.

The solicit() function currently can parse a message from a number of formats, including a scalar, scalar reference, array, or objects with the getlines method such as IO::Handle or IO::All.

On error, solicit() returns undef. Consult $Term::CallEditor::errstr for details.

EXAMPLES

Pass in a block of text to the editor.

my $fh = solicit(<< "BLARB");

FOO: This is an example designed to span multiple lines for the sake
FOO: of an example that span multiple lines.
BLARB

Support bbedit(1) on Mac OS X.

To use bbedit(1) as the EDITOR, create a shell script wrapper to call bbedit(1) as follows, then set the wrapper as the EDITOR environment variable.

#!/bin/sh
exec bbedit -w "$@"

AUTHOR

Jeremy Mates, <jmates@sial.org>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright 2004 by Jeremy Mates

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

HISTORY

Version control systems like CVS and Subversion have similar behaviour to prompt a user for a commit message, which this module is inspired from.