How can I script vim to run perltidy on a buffer?

Question

At my current job, we have coding-style standards that are different from the ones I normally follow. Fortunately, we have a canned RC file for perltidy that I can

Answer 1

Taking hobbs' answer a step further, you can map that command to a shortcut key:

command -range=% -nargs=* Tidy ,!perltidy -q
noremap  :Tidy

And another step further: Only map the command when you're in a Perl buffer (since you probably wouldn't want to run perltidy on any other language):

autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.pl,*.plx,*.pm command! -range=% -nargs=* Tidy ,!perltidy -q
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.pl,*.plx,*.pm noremap  :Tidy

Now you can press Ctrl-F6 without an active selection to format the whole file, or with an active selection to format just that section.