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IO::All to Larry Wall!

IO::All combines all of the best Perl IO modules into a single nifty object oriented interface to greatly simplify your everyday Perl IO idioms. It exports a single function called io, which returns a new IO::All object. And that object can do it all!

The IO::All object is a proxy for IO::File, IO::Dir, IO::Socket, Tie::File, File::Spec, File::Path, File::MimeInfo and File::ReadBackwards; as well as all the DBM and MLDBM modules. You can use most of the methods found in these classes and in IO::Handle (which they inherit from). IO::All adds dozens of other helpful idiomatic methods including file stat and manipulation functions.

IO::All is pluggable, and modules like IO::All::LWP and IO::All::Mailto add even more functionality. Optionally, every IO::All object can be tied to itself. This means that you can use most perl IO builtins on it: readline, <>, getc, print, printf, syswrite, sysread, close.

The distinguishing magic of IO::All is that it will automatically open (and close) files, directories, sockets and other IO things for you. You never need to specify the mode (<, >>, etc), since it is determined by the usage context. That means you can replace this:

open STUFF, '<', './mystuff'
  or die "Can't open './mystuff' for input:\n$!";
local $/;
my $stuff = <STUFF>;
close STUFF;

with this:

my $stuff < io './mystuff';

And that is a good thing!

USAGE

Normally just say:

use IO::All;

and IO::All will export a single function called io, which constructs all IO objects.

Note on io

The io function is a magic constructor. It is easy to use and will usually do the right thing, but can also blow up easily.

It takes a single optional argument and determines what type of IO::All subclass object to return. With no arguments it returns an IO::All object, which has no I/O methods, but has methods to construct subclass objects like IO::All::File.

In other words, these 2 statements are usually the same:

$content = io('file.txt')->all;
$content = io->file('file.txt')->all;

Use the first form when you are demonstrating your Perl virtues of laziness and impatience, and use the second form when your job is on the line.