What Is Perl

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The Complete Perl Reference

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Perl has become the new language of choice for many system management tasks. Combining elements of C, awk, sed, grep, and the Bourne shell, Perl is an excellent tool for text and file processing. Although Perl is often described as a ``system management language'', it is useful for many tasks that would otherwise be done with shell scripts.

``Perl'' is an acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language. It was developed by (and is still maintained by) Larry Wall of Netlabs. It is freely available software and compiles on nearly all major architectures and operating systems. These include all the major UNIX [*] variants as well as VMS and even DOS.

[*] UNIX is a trademark of AT&T. No, make that Unix Systems Laboratories. Or maybe Novell, Inc ...

Perl contains features of the Bourne shell (/bin/sh), awk, sed, and grep as well as access to systems calls and C library routines. It is said that Perl fills the niche between shell scripts and C programs.

Perl is not a compiled language but it is faster than most interpreted languages. Before executing a Perl script, the perl program reads the entire script into memory and ``compiles'' it into a fast internal format. In nearly all cases, a Perl script is faster than its Bourne shell analogue. Note that by convention, one refers to the Perl language in upper case and the perl program in lower case.

This document is intended to be an overview of the major features of Perl and does not describe every facet of the language. Much more extensive reference materials are available. These references, as well as pointers to example scripts, are detailed at the end of this document.

Maintained by Nick Grant < htmlstudio@talk21.com >