Possessed of a name that stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language" -- or maybe not -- Perl has expanded from its humble beginnings to let users perform a wide variety of tasks. Before you can use it to do any of those tasks, however, you must install it. That is the focus of this article, the first in a series that will teach you the basics of Perl programming.
Go to your C: Drive and create a folder called PerlPrograms. Then open up a notepad file and enter the following code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "James Payne is my Lord and Master!n";
Don't worry about what the code means right now; we'll cover that in a later tutorial. For now, just save the file with the filename test.pl. Copy it over to the PerlPrograms folder we just created.
The next step is to open the Windows Command Prompt. Go to Start>Run, type cmd and click the OK button.
At the prompt, type in the following to change to the current directory to the directory where your script file is located:
Perl Programming 
