Homegrown Perl-based Permutor

This script forms the core of a personal project of mine in which I needed
to generate all possible permutations of a select list of terms.

I didn’t need or want anything fancy (there are all sorts of modules to do
this in a more professional way) but was looking for more of a
‘back-of-the-envelope’ solution and decided to take a stab it.

So here it is, my homegrown solution. I figured I’d share this in the event
that others might appreciate its simplicity and find it useful.

Important

I use recursive calls in this script. The original purpose of this script
was to generate a relatively limited set of permuted terms but more than
otherwise permitted by Perl’s default recursive call warnings.

As a result, Perl’s recursion call warning is turned-off and I exercise
a hard-coded limit to exit the script if too many terms are supplied, since
generated permutations follow a factorial of the number of terms supplied.
Thus, you should take care to exercise caution when changing any recursion
ceiling limits.

A possible improvement could be to use an iterator so as to nullify onerous
memory requirements in the event a large array of terms is passed as input.

Sample Usage:

Call the function with a comma-separated array of terms like so:

perl -w permute.pl \Moe,Curly,Larry

Returns:

Preparing: 6 (all-terms) permutations...
Moe
MoeCurly
CurlyMoe
MoeCurlyLarry
MoeLarryCurly
CurlyMoeLarry
CurlyLarryMoe
LarryMoeCurly
LarryCurlyMoe