It’s not always easy to test interactive scripts. I have very little of innotop tested. I wrote the InnoDB parser with tests, but the rest of it is basically untested. I regret this decision.

The basic way to test everything is to put it into a module and use the Test::More module, which is part of standard Perl distributions. I have sometimes taken the approach of embedding modules into scripts to make them “runnable modules” that can still be tested. You can see an example of that here:

http://mysqltoolkit.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mysqltoolkit/trunk/mysql-log-parser/

You usually create a t/ subdirectory and place .t files in it, then you can either run them with perl or just enter that directory and type ‘prove’ to run them all.

One of my goals for innotop in the future is to extract a lot of the code, and put it into modules and test it. Some of the interactive stuff is hard to test, as I said, but a lot of it is easy, like the code that formats things to print out as tables.

I’d like to ask, how do you perform a tests on your perl code? I’m going to cover MMM with a test suite, but not sure what approach (and modules, etc) to choose. After a year with Ruby and its awesome testing frameworks I simply don’t know how to deal with perl’s crappy situation with testing :-/

Thanks!