PLOD is a tool designed to help administrators (and others) keep track
of their daily activities.  Since your management will typically have
no idea what you are doing to justify such an exorbitant salary (any
amount of money they may be paying you being classified as
"exorbitant"), and since most people forget what they do themselves,
it's good to keep a record.  Trot your logs out around performance
review time, and show them to your management (after suitable
sanitization) on a regular basis.

The interface is designed to make it quick to dash off a simple note
to yourself.  Since most folks who are going to use PLOD also use
email, I've based the interface on Berkeley mail-- tilde escapes and
all (for a list of escapes, try ~h or ~?).  By default, your logs will
be encrypted using the /bin/crypt command-- not secure in the least,
but marginally safe from casual browsing (I tend to vent into my logs
sometimes rather than at those who might be offended and fire me).
You can turn off the encryption if you find it more a hassle than a
comfort.

Which brings us to the subject of customization.  Many escape
sequences and variables have already been defined, but you can make
your own changes using your ~/.plodrc file.  This file is interpreted
using eval(), so any valid Perl syntax is acceptable.  Variables may
be customized by editing this script directly, setting an environment
variable with the same name as the PLOD variable, or by doing an
assignment in your .plodrc (.plodrc value supersedes environment value
which beats default value in script).  New tilde escapes may be
defined by assigning a type glob, say *foo, to the global array
%funcs-- the index of the type glob in the array being the character
(single chars only!) of the escape sequence.  &foo should be a
function which performs the escape (any arguments after the escape are
passed in as a single string in @_), and $foo can be a descriptive
help string (see &helpuser()).  Your functions may reference any of
the PLOD customization variables as well as the list @lines, which
contains all information in the current log entry (including the
date/time stamp PLOD adds to the beginning of each entry).  For
examples, consult the PLOD source code or the manual page.

PLOD is a living, growing entity.  If you have suggestions for
improvements or new features, or find any bugs, please send them to me
via email.  The latest version of PLOD is always available at
http://www.deer-run.com/~hal/plod/plod.shar

Share and enjoy!

Hal Pomeranz, hal@deer-run.com

===============================================================================

History:

v1.0 (Original release to comp.lang.perl)


v1.1 (Second release to comp.lang.perl)
** &pipetocmd() unlinks all temporary files it creates (Pomeranz)

** Variable assignment idiom cleaned up (Rantapaa)

** LOGDIR and HOME are only prepended to LOGFILE and DEADLOG after
   .plodrc has been eval-ed and if LOGFILE and DEADLOG are relative
   paths.  This means that you can change LOGDIR in your .plodrc and
   really affect where the log files go. (Rantapaa)

** eval of .plodrc is done with "do" rather than "cat" (Rantapaa)

** You can now do quick one-liner entries on the command line, e.g.
   "plod Completed modifications to PLOD" (Rantapaa)

** Time/date stamp only printed if user is entering info directly from
   a tty (Rantapaa)

** PLOD attempts to create logging directory if it does not exist (Ellis)


v1.2 (not publicly released)
** Page/Edit/Visual log files from interactive mode or from the shell
   (Tizard)


v1.3 (comp.lang.perl again, and also comp.sources.misc)
** Multi-line Perl input function, ~M (Crabb)

** Manual page generated (Pomeranz)


v1.4 (not publicly released)
** Trap for empty log entries and don't add them to log file (Pomeranz)

** -C flag to cat logfile to STDOUT (Prestemon)

** /etc/plodrc (Lachowski)

** $STAMP customization variable (Lachowski/Pomeranz)


v1.5 (not publicly released)
** Trap for non-existant/zero size/non-executable CRYPTCMD (Pomeranz)


v1.6 (comp.sources.misc, comp.lang.perl, LISA VII)
** Minor fix to above trap.  Would have been part of v1.5 but I had already
   distributed v1.5 to a few people.


v1.7 (comp.lang.perl)
** Minor code cleanup (finally ran perl -w ;-)) (Pomeranz)

** -f flag to change user startup file (Dignard)

** Modularized &encrypt and &decrypt to allow customization of encryption
   strategy (Schneebeli)

** Manual page updated (Pomeranz)

** Relative directory pattern matches corrected (Pomeranz)


v1.8
** $PREFIX and $SUFFIX variables added (Billingsley)

** Error checking on &encrypt and &decrypt (Ziemba)

** "plod -[g|G]" switch (Gibson)

** $SEPARATOR variable (Pomeranz)

** Changed argument passing to logedit(), and pageit(), and improved
   argument parsing on some tilde escapes (Pomeranz)

** Protect filenames that get passed to the shell (Pomeranz)

** -s option and $PROMPT to prompt for keys (Schneebeli/Pomeranz)

** Argument processing cleaned up (Pomeranz)

** $PLODRC variable added (Pomeranz)

** $BACKUP file mechanism (Pomeranz)

** post-execution routines (Pomeranz)

v1.9
** Y2K fixes (Evans)