Perl is a programming language that can be used for text manipulation, web development, network programming, system administration, development of GUIs, and a whole lot more. It was designed to be easy to use and efficient, and you can use either a traditional procedural or object oriented approach in your scripts. Perl also has a rather large list of third-party add-on modules that give it even more functionality.
In this section, we will cover just the very basics of Perl. Most typical Linux systems come with it and the documentation already installed. To see a brief introduction, run perldoc perlintro
on your system. The Perl introduction should come right up.
In order to run a Perl script, you can use the following Perl command:
perl filename.pl
The .pl
parameter is the usual extension given to Perl scripts. You can also place the path to Perl in the script similar to how we did with bash
. First run which perl
to see where Perl is located and then...