Introduction to 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 (Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language). Perl has the power and flexibility of a high-level programming language such as C. In fact many of the features of the language are borrowed from C. Like shell script languages, Perl does not require a compiler – the Perl interpreter runs your programs. This means that Perl is ideal for producing quick solutions to small programming problems and creating prototypes to test potential solutions to larger problems.
- Perl is a stable, cross platform programming language.
- It is used for mission critical projects in the public and private sectors.
- Perl is Open Source software, licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
- Perl was created by Larry Wall.
- Perl is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary
mod_perl allows the Apache web server to embed a Perl interpreter.
Perl’s DBI package makes web-database integration easy.
@INC is also printed as part of the output of
% perl -V
Example on how to read a url/web page in perl
#!/usr/bin/perl use LWP::Simple; my $url="http://www.gnulamp.com/perl.html"; my $webdata=get $url; print $webdata;If you have found my website useful, please consider buying me a coffee below 😉