proj4 and Perl for windows

All amazing people the world over use Perl to get stuff done. Sometimes the world conspires to make this a tiny bit harder than it should be. Today I want to convert coordinates using the proj4 library, but could not because the geo::proj4 library doesn't build nicely under windows. But, ugly to the rescue:

1) Install proj4 from http://trac.osgeo.org/proj/wiki/WikiStart#Download

2) Do the ugly:

# this works, would you adam and eve it

sub coords2pols {

my ($lat, $lon) = @_;

if ($lon > -50) {

($lon, $lat) = ($lat, $lon);

}

open my $fhi, '>tmp.txt' or die "tmp file $!";

print $fhi "$lon $lat\n";

close $fhi;

system('cs2cs +proj=longlat +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +no_defs +to +proj=stere +lat_0=-90 +lat_ts=-71 +lon_0=0 +k=1 +x_0=0 +y_0=0 +ellps=WGS84 +datum=WGS84 +units=m +no_defs tmp.txt > tmp.out.txt') and die "$@";

open my $fh, '

my $line = <$fh>;

close($fh);

chomp($line);

my ($x, $y) = split(/\s+/, $line);

unlink('tmp.txt');

unlink('tmp.out.txt');

($x, $y);

}