perl-review

Perl Review

Overview

Flag-only reviewer that applies the living standards in STANDARDS.md to Perl code. It reports violations grouped by rule and makes no edits and no commits — you apply fixes yourself.

STANDARDS.md is a table you edit freely. Adding or changing a rule needs no change to this file; the review reads whatever is in STANDARDS.md at runtime.

When to Use

• You ask to review / Perl-review / check Perl against the project standards.
• After writing or changing Perl (.pm, .pl, .t) on a branch.

Skip when: there is no in-scope Perl to review — report that and exit.

Dispatch this skill to a subagent

When invoked, dispatch the review to a general-purpose subagent via the Agent tool. Do not read every Perl file inline in the caller's context.

Why: reading the in-scope files and applying every rule is token-heavy, and the caller only needs the final grouped report.

How to dispatch:

• Brief the subagent with this SKILL.md and STANDARDS.md as its spec (pass both paths), the working directory, and the review target (the diff, or the paths the caller named).
• Require it to return only the grouped report and the one-line summary, in the format under "Report format" below.

If the user asks to run inline ("do it here so I can watch"), honour that — dispatch is the default, not a hard requirement.

What to Review

No paths given → the branch's committed changes against the base:

DEFAULT=$(git symbolic-ref --short refs/remotes/origin/HEAD 2>/dev/null | sed 's@^origin/@@')
if [ -z "$DEFAULT" ]; then
  for b in main master; do
    if git show-ref --verify --quiet "refs/heads/$b" \
      || git show-ref --verify --quiet "refs/remotes/origin/$b"; then
      DEFAULT=$b && break
    fi
  done
fi
BASE=$(git merge-base "$DEFAULT" HEAD)
git diff --name-only "$BASE"...HEAD

If origin/HEAD is unset, the loop falls back to whichever of main or master exists locally or on origin (so remote-only checkouts, e.g. CI, still resolve).

Paths given (e.g. lib/Foo.pm t/) → review those files / directories instead of the diff.

In-scope Perl files

• Extensions .pm, .pl, .t.
• Extensionless changed files whose first line is a Perl shebang (#!...perl).
• Out of scope (v1): .psgi, .cgi, .PL, .pod.

Tests-section rules apply to .t files; General-section rules apply to all in-scope Perl. If nothing is in scope, report "no Perl changes to review" and stop.

How to Apply the Rules

For each in-scope file, read it and check every applicable rule from STANDARDS.md:

• clear rules → report as violations.
• judgment rules → report as suggestions (the author may have a reason).

When one line trips two rules (e.g. a compile-only test that also uses use_ok), report it once under the most specific rule.

Report format

Group by rule; show only rules with hits. Each hit is file:line — detail. Label judgment-rule groups with — suggestion in the heading.

## single-quote non-interpolated strings (3)
- lib/Foo.pm:42 — "constant string" → 'constant string'
- ...

## alpha-sort hash keys — suggestion (1)
- lib/Bar.pm:88 — keys out of order: zebra, apple, mango

End with one line: N violations across M files, K rules.