Perl 101 (Part 1) - The Basics - ...And The Little Language That Could! (
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Perl is a very popular language
for server-side scripting primarily because of its close relationship with the
UNIX platform. Most Web servers run UNIX or one of its variants, and Perl is
available on most or all of these systems. The language is so powerful that many
routine administration tasks on such systems can be carried out in it, and its
superior pattern-matching techniques come in very useful for scanning large
amounts of data quickly.
Geeks will be happy to hear Perl is an
interpreted language. Why is this good? Well, one advantage of an interpreted
language is that it allows you to perform incremental, iterative development and
testing without going through a create/modify-compile-test-debug cycle each time
you change your code. This can speed the development cycle drastically. And
programming in Perl is relatively easy [famous last words!], especially if you
have experience in C or its clones. Perl can even access C libraries and take
advantage of program code written for this language, and the language is
renowned for the tremendous flexibility it allows programmers in accomplishing
specific tasks.
And then of course, there's cost and availability - Perl
is available free of charge on the Internet, for the UNIX, Windows and Macintosh
platforms. Source code and pre-compiled binaries can be obtained from
http://www.perl.com/, together with installation instructions. The examples in
this series of tutorials will assume Perl 5.x on Linux, although you're free to
use it on the platform of your choice.
If you're on a UNIX system, a
quick way to check whether Perl is already present on the system is with the
UNIX "which" command. Try typing this in your UNIX shell:
$ which perl
If Perl is available, the program should return the full path
to the Perl binary, usually
/usr/bin/perl
or
/usr/local/bin/perl
Or if you're really lazy, you could just ask your system
administrator.
On any other platform, try checking your PATH environment
variable for a directory containing the Perl executable.
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