Getting Started
Make sure that you have Perl on your system, if not grab a copy for the O/S that you have
Unix | www.perl.org |
Windows | www.activestate.com |
Running a Perl program
In the Unix environment there are two ways to run a perl program first by supplying your perl source code as one of the arguments to the perl executable or by placing a line of code which tells the shell where to locate the perl interpreter (this must be the first line of code).
Using perl source code as an argument to the perl executable | perl hello_world.pl |
Run the source without specifying the perl executable | hello_world.pl |
Obtain Perl version | perl -v |
In the windows world I have download a IDE environment (GUI) which allows me to edit the perl source code as well as run it, just make sure that the IE points to the Activestate perl executable
Executing in GUI | http://open-perl-ide.sourceforge.net/ |
Executing in DOS prompt | perl hello_world.pl |
Obtain Perl version | perl -v |
Sample Script
The first line tells the shell where to locate the interpreter (in this case the perl interpreter), the second line is a simple print statement.
Sample Code | #!/usr/local/bin/perl |
A statement is one task for the perl interpreter to perform, a perl program can be thought of as a collection of statements performed one at a time. The statement ends with a semi-colon as with the code above the print statement ends with a semi-colon.
The perl interpreter will ignore any whitespace unless it is in either single of double quotes.
You can use any editor (vi, emacs, notepad, IDE) to change perl source code, becareful if developing on windows and copying the code to a unix server, occasionally you end up with the DOS carriage return (^M) statements at the end of the code, use the 'Dos2Unix' command to remove these.
Perl User interaction
Perl has 3 ways to communicate with the user.
The default and other common options that they can use are
STDIN | keyboard (default) |
STDOUT | monitor (default) logfile |
STDERR | monitor (default) console port error logfile |