Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines - Prevent unused private subroutines.
This Policy is part of the core Perl::Critic distribution.
By convention Perl authors (like authors in many other languages) indicate private methods and variables by inserting a leading underscore before the identifier. This policy catches such subroutines which are not used in the file which declares them.
This module defines a 'use' of a subroutine as a subroutine or method call to it (other than from inside the subroutine itself), a reference to it (i.e. my $foo = \&_foo), a goto to it outside the subroutine itself (i.e. goto &_foo), or the use of the subroutine's name as an even-numbered argument to use overload.
my $foo = \&_foo
goto
goto &_foo
use overload
You can define what a private subroutine name looks like by specifying a regular expression for the private_name_regex option in your .perlcriticrc:
private_name_regex
[Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines] private_name_regex = _(?!_)\w+
The above example is a way of saying that subroutines that start with a double underscore are not considered to be private. (Perl::Critic, in its implementation, uses leading double underscores to indicate a distribution-private subroutine -- one that is allowed to be invoked by other Perl::Critic modules, but not by anything outside of Perl::Critic.)
You can configure additional subroutines to accept by specifying them in a space-delimited list to the allow option:
allow
[Subroutines::ProhibitUnusedPrivateSubroutines] allow = _bar _baz
These are added to the default list of exemptions from this policy. So the above allows sub _bar {} and sub _baz {}, even if they are not referred to in the module that defines them.
sub _bar {}
sub _baz {}
This policy is derived from Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs, which looks at the other side of the problem.
Does not forbid sub Foo::_foo{} because it does not know (and can not assume) what is in the Foo package.
sub Foo::_foo{}
Foo
Perl::Critic::Policy::Subroutines::ProtectPrivateSubs.
Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org>
Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Thomas R. Wyant, III.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of this license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.
To install Perl::Critic, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Perl::Critic
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Perl::Critic
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.