Introduction to PERL


Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is a language first designed for UNIX system administration. By borrowing heavily from C, sed, awk, and the Unix shells, Perl has become the language for many file processing and management, process management, and system administration tasks with its sophisticated pattern matching capabilities and flexible syntax. But it was not until the birth of CGI that PERL became so popular. Today no other language matches PERL's position in the CGI world. Over the years, Perl has been ported to many different platforms such as MS-DOS and Windows NT.

Unlike C and other compiled programming languages, Perl is interpreted. So we often call the Perl program "Perl script". The latest version is Perl 5.0.

Hello, World Example

Here is the basic perl program "hello.pl" that we'll use to get started.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
# This is the famous Hello, world example
#
print 'Hello world.';           #Print the word

Program Components

There are three main parts to this program:

How to Run the program


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