Is the Perl .plx filename extension ever used in real-life?

Question

ActiveState Perl installs an IIS script mapping for the extension .plx. Is this actually used in real life or just something specific to ActiveState?

Gagliardi

Answer 1

No, it's not just from ActiveState. O'Reilly's Learning Perl on Win32 systems recommends naming scripts with a .plx extension to disambiguate them from perl modules (with .pm) and non-executable perl libraries (.pl). Nowadays however I'd name anything that is going to be directly run as .pl.

Fate

All good answers and upvoted, but this one said it best. Thanks guys. – Gagliardi

Answer 2

This is a matter of personal preference. It is not something unique to ActiveState. PLX stands for Perl Executable Script which is perhaps a bit more defined then PL which stands for Perl Script (apparently originally Perl Library as another user wrote). However, on CPAN you see numerous places where PLX is used as extension so it is perhaps not so rare as it seems:

• On CPAN acx.plx
• kobesearch.cpan.org on SerialPort
• tag.plx on CPAN

etc.

UPDATE: here's an earlier discussion of the same discussing whether *.pl or *.plx should be used. It also mentions that Prolog uses *.pl as well and playlist is yet another use.

Federalese

Answer 3

Google shows some matches and there are quite a few of them on CPAN. In fact, originally, .pl stood for 'Perl library'.

Kerstinkerwin