Hello World

To create a simple Perl script, we can use the text editor of choice. For short scripts vi or vim works well, as does gedit if you want to work in GUI. For larger projects an IDE may help. Often, the IDE will allow you to change the object name easily throughout the script and provide expansion of object names. In this chapter, we will make use of very simple scripts so we will continue to use vi.

We will create a $HOME/bin/hello.pl file to produce the output we want:

#!/usr/bin/perl
print("Hello World\n");

The file still needs to be in a directory within our PATH variable; hence, we create $HOME/bin. If it is not in the PATH variable then we will need to specify the full or relative path of the file, as with bash.

The file will need to be set with the execute permission. We can do this with the following command:

$ chmod u+x $HOME/bin/hello.pl

We can run the script with the following command:

$ hello.pl

We can see that the code that we have added is the same as the one...