Perl Intro

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; 
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