PERL

1
PERL

• For Knowledge Sharing 1 - SCUBE

2
Introduction

• Perl is short for "Practical Extraction and
  Report Language

3
Introduction

• It is clearly an offspring of the various Unix
  shells and the C language, tools many system
  administrators are comfortable using.
• It is available on almost all modern operating
  systems. It does its best to present a consistent
  interface on each. This is important for
  multiplatform system administration.
• It has excellent tools for text manipulation,
  database access, and network programming, three
  of the mainstays of the profession.
• The core language can easily be extended through
  a carefully constructed module mechanism.
• A large and dedicated community of users has
  poured countless hours into creating modules for
  virtually every task. Most of these modules are
  collected in an organized fashion (more on these
  collections in a moment). This community support
  can be very empowering.
• It is just plain fun to program.

4
CPAN

• Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)
• CPAN is a huge archive of Perl source code,
  documentation, scripts, and modules that is
  replicated at over a hundred sites around the
  world. Information on CPAN can be found at
  http//www.cpan.org. The easiest way to find the
  modules on CPAN is to use the search engine
  developed and maintained by Elaine Ashton, Graham
  Barr, and Clifton Posey at http//search.cpan.org.
  

5
Modules

• Installing Modules on Unix
• In most cases, the process goes like this
• Download the module and unpack it.
• Run perl Makefile.PL to create the necessary
  Makefile.
• Run make to build the package.
• Run make test to run any test suites included
  with the module by the author.
• Run make install to install it in the usual place
  for modules on your system.

6
A basic example

• A basic "Hello, world" program
• !/usr/bin/perl -w
• print ("Hello, world!\n")