PTools version 0.01
===================

PTools is a collection of Perl Tools for Perl Tool Developers. These
meta-tools have evolved over the years to simplify the normal, everyday
types of tasks that most scripts, at some point, need to address.

PTools includes a couple of modules that implement a flexible, multi-tier
library heirarchy for larger applications that makes the development
and evolution of modules and apps a lot easier. These also allow for
completely relocatable Perl scripts without modification to directory
paths, and allow close integration with Web CGI and/or document URLs. 

PTools includes a module that allows module creators to create
'extendible' methods. This allows users of their modules to choose
what class will actually get invoked when a method is called. What's
this good for? Deciding during run-time what class is used to 'sort()' 
data in a given application, or deciding what class is used to
'lock()' and 'unlock()' a resource to prevent concurrency issues.

PTools also includes such things as 
a module to handle the counters in an application (with nice formatting);
a module to easily turn a script into a daemon process; 
a module to temporarialy redirect stdout and/or stderr to a string or an 
array; OO interfaces to Getopt::Long, Date::Format and Date::Parse 
(with some added value).

See example scripts under the 'eg' subdirectory included with this 
distribution.


INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install


DEPENDENCIES

Standard modules used include the following.

   Carp           POSIX
   Exporter       Test::More
   Fcntl          strict
   Getopt::Long   warnings

Additional modules used include the following.

   Date::Format   - 2.22 or later
   Date::Parse    - 2.23 or later
   Getopt::Long   - 2.17 or later


COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 by Chris Cobb
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.