Perl - Global variables available in all included scripts and modules?

Question

So lets say I have a main.pl script and in that script I need to declare some variables (any kind of variable constant or normal) and those variables need to be available through all scripts and modules that I'll include from that main.pl script automatically.

What I mean if I have a variable $myVar in main.pl and from main.pl I require script1.pl, script2.pl or script3.pm, and from anyone of those scripts I need to access $myVar as you would access any var defined in that specific script or module.

I've searched on the net, but I've only found examples where you can access variables from the scripts you include or extract variables from modules; but that's not what I want.

Isn't there a keyword like in PHP where you would use global $var1, $var2 etc. to use variable from the parent script?

Any example, documentation or article is acceptable - basically anything that could help me accomplish that would be helpful.

Answer 1

You can declare global variables with the our keyword:

our $var = 42;

Each global variable has a fully qualified name which can be used to access it from anywhere. The full name is the package name plus the variable name. If you haven't yet declared a package at that point, you are in package main, which can be shortened to a leading ::. So the above variable has the names

$var       # inside package main
$main::var # This is most obvious
$::var     # This may be a good compromise

If we had used another package, the prefix would change, e.g.

package Foo;
our $bar = "baz";
# $Foo::bar from anywhere,
# or even $::Foo::bar or $main::Foo::bar

If we want to use a variable without the prefix, but under other packages, we have to export it. This is usually done by subclassing Exporter, see @Davids answer. However, this can only provide variables from packages that are being used, not the other way round. E.g.

Foo.pm:

package Foo;
use strict; use warnings;
use parent 'Exporter'; # imports and subclasses Exporter

our $var = 42;
our $not_exported = "don't look at me";

our @EXPORT = qw($var); # put stuff here you want to export
# put vars into @EXPORT_OK that will be exported on request

1;

script.pl:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# this is implicitly package main
use Foo; # imports $var

print "var = $var\n"; # access the variable without prefix
print "$Foo::not_exported\n"; # access non-exported var with full name

Lexical variables (declared with my) don't have globally unique names and can't be accessed outside their static scope. They also can't be used with Exporter.