parent(3pm)

💖 parent(3pm) — the Perl Programmers Reference Guide, but make it group-chat 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

• parent — establish an ISA relationship with base classes at compile time. Periodt. 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

package Baz;
use parent qw(Foo Bar);

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Okay so bestie, this module lets you do two iconic things at once: load one or more modules, and set up inheritance from those modules at the same time. Mostly similar in effect to this:

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. But 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';

🎀 HISTORY 🎀

This module was forked from base to remove the cruft that had accumulated in it. Spring cleaning era, honestly. 🧹✨

💀 CAVEATS 💀

The CAVEATS section is literally empty in this one — nothing listed here, bestie. 💀🫶

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

• base
• parent::versioned — a fork of parent that provides version checking in parent class modules.

🫶 AUTHORS AND CONTRIBUTORS 🫶

Rafaël Garcia-Suarez, Bart Lateur, Max Maischein, Anno Siegel, Michael Schwern. Absolute legends, all of them. 💖

💅 MAINTAINER 💅

Max Maischein — corion@cpan.org

Copyright (c) 2007-2017 Max Maischein <corion@cpan.org> Based on the idea of base.pm, which was introduced with Perl 5.004_04.

🌈 LICENSE 🌈

This module is released under the same terms as Perl itself. Slay, legally speaking. ⭐

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perl v5.42.3 · 2026-11-03 · parent(3pm) — that’s the whole manual, bestie. Go forth and inherit responsibly. 💖✨🦋