The intent of File::ShareDir is to provide a companion to
Class::Inspector and File::HomeDir, modules that take a process that is
well-known by advanced Perl developers but gets a little tricky, and
make it more available to the larger Perl community.

Quite often you want or need your Perl module (CPAN or otherwise) to
have access to a large amount of read-only data that is stored on the
file-system at run-time.

On a linux-like system, this would be in a place such as /usr/share,
however Perl runs on a wide variety of different systems, and so the use
of any one location is unreliable.

Perl provides a little-known method for doing this, but almost nobody is
aware that it exists. As a result, module authors often go through some
very strange ways to make the data available to their code.

The most common of these is to dump the data out to an enormous Perl
data structure and save it into the module itself. The result are
enormous multi-megabyte .pm files that chew up a lot of memory
needlessly.

• Vitaly Lipatov

• perl-File-ShareDir