What can you program with perl

Docs Core documentation, FAQs and translations. Contribute Perl is being actively developed. There are many ways to get involved. Events Events, conferences, social and technical events around the world offer lots of networking and learning opportunities. Perl is still used for its original purpose i. It can produce reports on resource use and check for security issues in a network.

Due to this reason, Perl has become a popular language used in web development, networking and bioinformatics too. Apart from all this perl can also be used for CGI programming.

Apart from that networking via telnet, FTP, etc. Perl is flexible enough to support Procedural as well as OOP practices simultaneously. This means that you can combine Perl with these extra programming languages rather rewriting existing code. It is true that there are other programming languages that can be used to do all the stuff that has been stated above, then why should you specifically use Perl? Perl is very easy to learn , especially if you have a background in computer programming.

Perl was designed to be easy for humans to write and understand rather than making it easy for processing by computers. It uses regular expressions. Perl is extremely portable. It can run on any operating system that has Perl interpreter installed, so it is platform independent. This is unlike Shell scripts, where the code changes with the flavor of Linux distribution being used, making it less and less portable Small specific tasks in Perl become very easy and quick.

Throughout this Perl tutorial for beginners, you will learn how you can code small, quick programs for specific tasks. The above two lines of code will print Hello, world! You might be wondering why Perl is so famous on the Web. It is simple as most of the things that happen on the web are of TEXT and Perl is very good at text processing. If we compare Perl with any of the languages, then Perl will be the best language which is good in File handling, text processing, and output reporting.

The Perl community strongly believes that software should be freely available, freely modifiable and freely distributable. Several volunteers from Perl community strive to make the programming language as good as possible. With enough knowledge about the history of Perl and basic concepts of computer programming required for coding in Perl, it is time we take the dive and get started with Perl. The next chapter will teach you how you can setup Perl on your system and get ready for the coding journey in Perl.

This Perl scripting tutorial will take Linux as the OS which students will be using for coding in Perl. In this case, the version is v5. The rest will be taken care of. Just make sure you have an active internet connection. First, download the Active Perl from this link. Follow these steps to install ActivePerl on Windows system.

See the below screenshots for the same. Step 1: Once you download the installer and start the installation you will see the below window, click on next to proceed.

Step 3: Below are different packages that will be installed. By default, all will be selected. This is the utility provided by Active Perl to install external Perl modules or libraries in your system. Click on Next to proceed. Step 4: These are different types of Perl extensions that can be used for Perl.

Mostly we will be using. Plx and. Pm for Perl. Perl modules basically use. Pm as their file extension to refer to a library file. Select all the options and click on the Next button. You need to manually install those. But these files are not mandatory to start coding in Perl. Everything will be clear soon.

Come on and take a look at it by line:. This special line must be at the beginning of your program and must starts from! The print instruction writes text to the screen. The semicolon at the end of the line tells the perl interpreter that the instruction is finished. You must put a semicolon at the end of every instruction in Perl code. Save the above script as firstprog. If you have Strawberry installed, you can simply click on Run.

You can also run command-line interface and write on the console:. Type in the Terminal:. Modules are set of codes that are used to do tasks that perform common operations in several programs. If you use perl modules, you do not have to rewrite the codes to perform that same operation. Perl can make use of such external libraries of codes. One of the best libraries is the CPAN. It stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network and contains a vast amount of Perl modules for you to use.

It is a community or network of a large number of developers who contribute such modules. Modules may have dependencies on other modules almost always on CPAN and cannot be installed without them or without a specific version of them.

It is worth thoroughly reading the documentation for the options below. To Install App-cpanminus perl modules, in the command line type:. You can imagine variable like kind of container which holds one or more values. Once defined, the name of variable remains the same, but the value or values change over and over again. If you are familiar with other programming languages, then you would know that there are certain rules about naming variables.

Similarly, Perl has three rules for naming scalars. Scalars can be read from devices, and we can use it to our programs. Notice: In general, Perl interpreter sees integers like floating points numbers.

For example, if you write 2 in your programs, Perl will see it like 2. It consists of one or more digits, optionally preceded by a plus or minus and containing underscores. But believe me, this is the most common type of scalars. Allow me to show you Octal, Hexadecimal and Binary representation. A short table presents all important information about this weird styles:.

All of these values for Perl means the same. It will internally convert these hexadecimal, binary, octal to decimal values. Perl uses for that equal sign. It takes a value of the expression from the right side and puts this value to our variable. The maximum length of a string in Perl depends upon the amount of memory the computer has. There is no limit to the size of the string, any amount of characters, symbols, or words can make up your strings. The shortest string has no characters.

The longest can fill all of the system memory. Perl also permits you to add any 8-bit or bit character set aka. Perl has also added support for Unicode UTF Single quotation marks are used to enclose data you want to be taken literally. A short example and everything should be clear:. Double quotation marks are used to enclose data that needs to be interpolated before processing. Escape characters can be used to insert newlines, tabs, etc. Double-quotes interpolate scalar and array variables, but not hashes.

On the other hand, you can use double-quotes to interpolate slices of both arrays and hashes. Yes, they are! Check the table below. The first version of Perl was 1. Perl 6 is different from Perl 5 because it is a fully object-oriented reimplementation of Perl 5. Key features Perl has many reasons for being popular and in demand. Contained best Features: Perl contains the features of different languages like C , sed, awk, and sh, etc. System Administration: Perl makes the task of system administration very easy.

Instead of becoming dependent on many languages, just use Perl to complete out the whole task of system administration. Web and Perl: Perl can be embedded into web servers to increase its processing power and it has the DBI package, which makes web-database integration very easy. Application Areas.

Since Perl is a lot similar to other widely used languages syntactically, it is easier to code and learn in Perl. One can also use an online IDE for writing Perl codes or can even install one on their system to make it more feasible to write these codes because IDEs provide a lot of features like intuitive code editor, debugger, compiler, etc.

To begin with, writing Perl Codes and performing various intriguing and useful operations, one must have Perl installed on their System. This can be done by following the step by step instructions provided below: What if Perl already exists??

Many Linux systems have Perl preinstalled, also Macintosh provides a preinstalled Perl with their Systems. Using Command-Line: You can also use command line options to run a Perl program. If your code has no error then it will execute properly and output will be displayed. Fundamentals of Perl Variables Variables are user-defined words that are used to hold the values passed to the program which will be used to evaluate the Code.

Every Perl program contains values on which the Code performs its operations. A value is the data passed to the program to perform manipulation operations.

This data can be either numbers, strings, characters, lists, etc. Operators allow the programmer to perform different kinds of operations on operands.

A notational symbol that represents a number is termed a numeral. These numerals, in addition to their use in mathematical operations, are also used for ordering in the form of serial numbers.

Types of numbers:. Perl is a loosely typed language. There is no need to specify a type for the data while using it in the Perl program. The Perl interpreter will choose the type based on the context of the data itself.

Scalars It is a single unit of data which can be an integer number, floating-point, a character, a string, a paragraph, or an entire web page. Arrays An array is a variable that stores the value of the same data type in the form of a list.

It will create an array of integers that contains the values 40, 55, 63, 17, and many more. Array creation and accessing elements:! It is also termed as the Associative Arrays. Creating and Accessing Hash elements:. The string can consist of a single word, a group of words, or a multi-line paragraph. To overcome this situation, the escape character i. This allows the use of escape characters in the interpolated string. A programming language uses control statements to control the flow of execution of the program based on certain conditions.

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