less(3perl)                      Perl Programmers Reference Guide                     less(3perl)



NAME
       less - perl pragma to request less of something

SYNOPSIS
           use less 'CPU';

DESCRIPTION
       This is a user-pragma. If you're very lucky some code you're using will know that you
       asked for less CPU usage or ram or fat or... we just can't know. Consult your
       documentation on everything you're currently using.

       For general suggestions, try requesting "CPU" or "memory".

           use less 'memory';
           use less 'CPU';
           use less 'fat';

       If you ask for nothing in particular, you'll be asking for "less 'please'".

           use less 'please';

FOR MODULE AUTHORS
       less has been in the core as a "joke" module for ages now and it hasn't had any real way
       to communicating any information to anything. Thanks to Nicholas Clark we have user
       pragmas (see perlpragma) and now "less" can do something.

       You can probably expect your users to be able to guess that they can request less CPU or
       memory or just "less" overall.

       If the user didn't specify anything, it's interpreted as having used the "please" tag.
       It's up to you to make this useful.

         # equivalent
         use less;
         use less 'please';

   "BOOLEAN = less->of( FEATURE )"
       The class method "less->of( NAME )" returns a boolean to tell you whether your user
       requested less of something.

         if ( less->of( 'CPU' ) ) {
             ...
         }
         elsif ( less->of( 'memory' ) ) {

         }

   "FEATURES = less->of()"
       If you don't ask for any feature, you get the list of features that the user requested you
       to be nice to. This has the nice side effect that if you don't respect anything in
       particular then you can just ask for it and use it like a boolean.

         if ( less->of ) {
             ...
         }
         else {
             ...
         }

CAVEATS
       This probably does nothing.
       This works only on 5.10+
           At least it's backwards compatible in not doing much.



perl v5.20.2                                2014-12-27                                less(3perl)