File Format

The file should be an ordinary text file, consisting of a series of lines, with each line completely containing the information for a single item. Blank lines, or lines beginning with the hash character '#' will be ignored as comments.

For a single item line, only word characters will be used. A 'word character' consists of all letters and numbers, and the underscore '_' character. Anything that is not a word character will be assumed to be a seperator.

The first word will be used as the name or id of the item, and any further words in the line will be used as other items that this one depends on. For example, all of the following are legal.

  # A single item with no dependencies
  Foo
  # Another item that depends on the first one
  Bar Foo
  # Depending on multiple others
  Bin Foo Bar
  # We can use different seperators
  One:Two|Three-Four+Five=Six Seven
  # We can also use multiple non-word characters as seperators
  This&*&^*&File:  is& & & :::REALLY()Neat

From the examples above, it should be easy to create your own files.

new $filename

When constructing a new Algorithm::Dependency::Source::File object, an argument should be provided of the name of the file to use. The constructor will check that the file exists, and is readable, returning "undef" otherwise.