Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language.
Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.
Perl Features
- Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
- Perl is Open Source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
- Perl was created by Larry Wall.
- Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others.
- Perl’s database integration interface (DBI) supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others.
- Perl works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages. It can be used also for developing dynamic web applications as CGIs.
- Perl supports both procedural and object-oriented programming.
- Perl is extensible. There are over 1000 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).
- Safety net(strict,warnings)
- Perl can be embedded into web servers to speed up processing.
- Perl's mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
Running Perl programs
To run a Perl program from the Unix command line:
perl progname.pl
Alternatively, put this as the first line of your script:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
chmod 755 script.pl (under Unix).
Run the script as /path/to/script.pl.
Basic Syntex:
§ print("Hello, world\n");
§ print "Hello, world\n";
§ print 42;