What Is Perl?
Perl is an acronym, short for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It was designed
by Larry Wall as a tool for writing programs in the UNIX environment and is
continually being updated and maintained by him.
For its many fans, Perl provides the best of several worlds. For instance:
l Perl has the power and flexibility of a high-level programming language such as
C. In fact, as you will see, many of the features of the language are borrowed
from C.
l Like shell script languages, Perl does not require a special compiler and linker to
turn the programs you write into working code. Instead, all you have to do is
write the program and tell Perl to run it. This means that Perl is ideal for
producing quick solutions to small programming problems, or for creating
prototypes to test potential solutions to larger problems.
l Perl provides all the features of the script languages sed and awk, plus features
not found in either of these two languages. Perl also supports a sed-to-Perl
translator and an awk-to-Perl translator.
In short, Perl is as powerful as C but as convenient as awk, sed, and shell scripts.
NOTE
This book assumes that you are familiar with the basics
of using the UNIX operating system
As you'll see, Perl is very easy to learn. Indeed, if you are familiar with other
programming languages, learning Perl is a snap. Even if you have very little
programming experience, Perl can have you writing useful programs in a very short time.
By the end of Day 2, "Basic Operators and Control Flow," you'll know enough about
Perl to be able to solve many problems.
How Do I Find Perl?
To find out whether Perl already is available on your system, do the following:
l If you are currently working in a UNIX programming environment, check to see
whether the file /usr/local/bin/perl exists.
l If you are working in any other environment, check the place where you
normally keep your executable programs, or check the directories accessible from
your PATH environment variable.