So I was trying to use perltidy programmatically, that means using Perl::Tidy. Basically I wanted to use an existing .perltidyrc along with the backup option. That is, instead of making a new file with .tdy at the end, replace the original and back it up to .bak. So after reading the docs I figured that this should work:

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   use Perl::Tidy ();
   use File::Spec;

   my $file = File::Spec->catfile( $dir,
      $filename );

   Perl::Tidy::perltidy(
      source     => $file,
      argv        => '-b',
      perltidyrc => $perltidyrc,
   );

Unfortunately that just doesn’t work. Here’s how I got it to work:

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   Perl::Tidy::perltidy(
      argv        => "-b $file",
      perltidyrc => $perltidyrc,
   );

I also had to modify the .perltidyrc file some as apparently Perl::Tidy doesn’t have a way to choose who wins when there are conflicts in the switches and the config file. One way or another, it was annoying.

Maybe I was doing it wrong?