parent(3p)

parent3p

Establish an isa relationship with base classes at compile time

Usage

    package Baz;
    use parent qw(Foo Bar);

Overview

Allows you to both load one or more modules, while setting up inheritance from those modules at the same time. Mostly similar in effect to

    package Baz;
    BEGIN {
        require Foo;
        require Bar;
        push @ISA, qw(Foo Bar);
    }

By default, every base class needs to live in a file of its own. If you want to have a subclass and its parent class in the same file, you can tell "parent" not to load any modules by using the "-norequire" switch:

  package Foo;
  sub exclaim { "I CAN HAS PERL" }
  package DoesNotLoadFooBar;
  use parent -norequire, 'Foo', 'Bar';
  # will not go looking for Foo.pm or Bar.pm

This is equivalent to the following code:

  package Foo;
  sub exclaim { "I CAN HAS PERL" }
  package DoesNotLoadFooBar;
  push @DoesNotLoadFooBar::ISA, 'Foo', 'Bar';

This is also helpful for the case where a package lives within a differently named file:

  package MyHash;
  use Tie::Hash;
  use parent -norequire, 'Tie::StdHash';

This is equivalent to the following code:

  package MyHash;
  require Tie::Hash;
  push @ISA, 'Tie::StdHash';

If you want to load a subclass from a file that "require" would not consider an eligible filename (that is, it does not end in either ".pm" or ".pmc"), use the following code:

  package MySecondPlugin;
  require './plugins/custom.plugin'; # contains Plugin::Custom
  use parent -norequire, 'Plugin::Custom';

Caveats

Authors and contributors

Rafaël Garcia-Suarez, Bart Lateur, Max Maischein, Anno Siegel, Michael Schwern

Maintainer

Max Maischein " [email protected] "

Copyright (c) 2007-2017 Max Maischein "<[email protected]>" Based on the idea of "base.pm", which was introduced with Perl 5.004_04.

Releases

32 releases since OpenBSD 5.0; the text changed 20 times.

  1. 5.0–5.3
  2. 5.4–5.5
  3. 5.6
  4. 5.7
  5. 5.8–5.9
  6. 6.0
  7. 6.1
  8. 6.2
  9. 6.3–6.4
  10. 6.5
  11. 6.6
  12. 6.7
  13. 6.8
  14. 6.9–7.2
  15. 7.3
  16. 7.4
  17. 7.5
  18. 7.6
  19. 7.7–7.8
  20. 7.9
  21. 8.0

History

This module was forked from base to remove the cruft that had accumulated in it.

License

This module is released under the same terms as Perl itself.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's man source.