perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
perl [ -sTuU ] [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ] [ -cw ] [ -d[:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ] [ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal] ] [ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ] [ -P ] [ -S ] [ -x[dir] ] [ -i[extension] ] [ -e 'command' ] [ -- ] [ programfile ] [ argument ]...
For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into several sections:
perl Perl overview (this section)
perldelta Perl changes since previous version
perl5005delta Perl changes in version 5.005
perl5004delta Perl changes in version 5.004
perlfaq Perl frequently asked questions
perltoc Perl documentation table of contents
perldata Perl data structures
perlsyn Perl syntax
perlop Perl operators and precedence
perlre Perl regular expressions
perlrun Perl execution and options
perlfunc Perl builtin functions
perlopentut Perl open() tutorial
perlvar Perl predefined variables
perlsub Perl subroutines
perlmod Perl modules: how they work
perlmodlib Perl modules: how to write and use
perlmodinstall Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
perlform Perl formats
perlunicode Perl unicode support
perllocale Perl locale support
perlreftut Perl references short introduction
perlref Perl references, the rest of the story
perldsc Perl data structures intro
perllol Perl data structures: arrays of arrays
perlboot Perl OO tutorial for beginners
perltoot Perl OO tutorial, part 1
perltootc Perl OO tutorial, part 2
perlobj Perl objects
perltie Perl objects hidden behind simple variables
perlbot Perl OO tricks and examples
perlipc Perl interprocess communication
perlfork Perl fork() information
perlthrtut Perl threads tutorial
perllexwarn Perl warnings and their control
perlfilter Perl source filters
perldbmfilter Perl DBM filters
perlcompile Perl compiler suite intro
perldebug Perl debugging
perldiag Perl diagnostic messages
perlnumber Perl number semantics
perlsec Perl security
perltrap Perl traps for the unwary
perlport Perl portability guide
perlstyle Perl style guide
perlpod Perl plain old documentation
perlbook Perl book information
perlembed Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
perlapio Perl internal IO abstraction interface
perldebguts Perl debugging guts and tips
perlxs Perl XS application programming interface
perlxstut Perl XS tutorial
perlguts Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
perlcall Perl calling conventions from C
perlapi Perl API listing (autogenerated)
perlintern Perl internal functions (autogenerated)
perltodo Perl things to do
perlhack Perl hackers guide
perlhist Perl history records
perlamiga Perl notes for Amiga
perlcygwin Perl notes for Cygwin
perldos Perl notes for DOS
perlhpux Perl notes for HP-UX
perlmachten Perl notes for Power MachTen
perlos2 Perl notes for OS/2
perlos390 Perl notes for OS/390
perlvms Perl notes for VMS
perlwin32 Perl notes for Windows(If you're intending to read these straight through for the first time, the suggested order will tend to reduce the number of forward references.)
By default, the manpages listed above are installed in the /usr/local/man/ directory.
Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is available. The default configuration for perl will place this additional documentation in the /usr/local/lib/perl5/man directory (or else in the man subdirectory of the Perl library directory). Some of this additional documentation is distributed standard with Perl, but you'll also find documentation for third-party modules there.
You should be able to view Perl's documentation with your man(1) program by including the proper directories in the appropriate start-up files, or in the MANPATH environment variable. To find out where the configuration has installed the manpages, type:
perl -V:man.dirIf the directories have a common stem, such as /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man3, you need only to add that stem (/usr/local/man) to your man(1) configuration files or your MANPATH environment variable. If they do not share a stem, you'll have to add both stems.
If that doesn't work for some reason, you can still use the supplied perldoc script to view module information. You might also look into getting a replacement man program.
If something strange has gone wrong with your program and you're not sure where you should look for help, try the -w switch first. It will often point out exactly where the trouble is.
Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid security holes.
If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.
But wait, there's more...
Begun in 1993 (see perlhist), Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite that provides the following additional benefits:
modularity and reusability using innumerable modules
Described in perlmod, perlmodlib, and perlmodinstall.
embeddable and extensible
Described in perlembed, perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, and xsubpp.
roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple simultaneous DBM implementations)
Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.
subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and prototyped
Described in perlsub.
arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous functions
Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perllol.
object-oriented programming
compilability into C code or Perl bytecode
Described in B and B::Bytecode.
support for light-weight processes (threads)
Described in perlthrtut and Thread.
support for internationalization, localization, and Unicode
Described in perllocale and utf8.
lexical scoping
Described in perlsub.
regular expression enhancements
enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment, with integrated editor support
Described in perldebug.
POSIX 1003.1 compliant library
Described in POSIX.
Okay, that's definitely enough hype.
Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually all Unix-like platforms. See "Supported Platforms" in perlport for a listing.
See perlrun.
Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>, with the help of oodles of other folks.
If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of help to others who wish to advocate the use of Perl in their applications, or if you wish to simply express your gratitude to Larry and the Perl developers, please write to perl-thanks@perl.org .
"@INC" locations of perl librariesa2p awk to perl translator
s2p sed to perl translator
http://www.perl.com/ the Perl Home Page
http://www.perl.com/CPAN the Comprehensive Perl ArchiveThe use warnings pragma (and the -w switch) produces some lovely diagnostics.
See perldiag for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics. The use diagnostics pragma automatically turns Perl's normally terse warnings and errors into these longer forms.
Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the error, with an indication of the next token or token type that was to be examined. (In a script passed to Perl via -e switches, each -e is counted as one line.)
Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce error messages such as "Insecure dependency". See perlsec.
Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the -w switch?
The -w switch is not mandatory.
Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of various operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point output with sprintf().
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a particular stream, so does Perl. (This doesn't apply to sysread() and syswrite().)
While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary size limits (apart from memory size), there are still a few arbitrary limits: a given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters. Line numbers displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short integers, so they are limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being affected by wraparound).
You may mail your bug reports (be sure to include full configuration information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source tree, or by perl -V) to perlbug@perl.com . If you've succeeded in compiling perl, the perlbug script in the utils/ subdirectory can be used to help mail in a bug report.
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that.
The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.