Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitUnusedVariables(3pm)

Perl::Critic::Policy::Variables::ProhibitUnusedVariables3pm

Don't ask for storage you don't need.

Affiliation

This Policy is part of the core Perl::Critic distribution.

Overview

Unused variables clutter code and require the reader to do mental bookkeeping to figure out if the variable is actually used or not.

At present, this Policy is very limited in order to ensure that there aren't any false positives. Hopefully, this will become more sophisticated soon.

Right now, this only looks for simply declared, uninitialized lexical variables.

    my $x;          # not ok, assuming no other appearances.
    my @y = ();     # ok, not handled yet.
    our $z;         # ok, global.
    local $w;       # ok, global.

This module is very dumb: it does no scoping detection, i.e. if the same variable name is used in two different locations, even if they aren't the same variable, this Policy won't complain.

Have to start somewhere.

Configuration

This Policy is not configurable except for the standard options.

Releases

10 releases since Debian 5.0 (Lenny); the text changed 9 times.

  1. 5.0
  2. 6.0
  3. 7
  4. 8
  5. 9
  6. 10
  7. 11
  8. 12
  9. 13
  10. Arch

Author

Elliot Shank "<[email protected]>"

From perl-perl-critic 1.156-3 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.