CONTENTS

• NAME
• DESCRIPTION
  • What is Perl?
  • Running Perl programs
  • Safety net
  • Basic syntax overview
  • Perl variable types
  • Variable scoping
  • Conditional and looping constructs
  • Builtin operators and functions
  • Files and I/O
  • Regular expressions
  • Writing subroutines
  • OO Perl
  • Using Perl modules
• AUTHOR

#NAME

perlintro -- a brief introduction and overview of Perl

#DESCRIPTION

This document is intended to give you a quick overview of the Perl programming language, along with pointers to further documentation. It is intended as a "bootstrap" guide for those who are new to the language, and provides just enough information for you to be able to read other peoples' Perl and understand roughly what it's doing, or write your own simple scripts.

This introductory document does not aim to be complete. It does not even aim to be entirely accurate. In some cases perfection has been sacrificed in the goal of getting the general idea across. You are strongly advised to follow this introduction with more information from the full Perl manual, the table of contents to which can be found in perltoc.

Throughout this document you'll see references to other parts of the Perl documentation. You can read that documentation using the perldoc command or whatever method you're using to read this document.

#What is Perl?

Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules.

Different definitions of Perl are given in perl, perlfaq1 and no doubt other places. From this we can determine that Perl is different things to different people, but that lots of people think it's at least worth writing about.

#Running Perl programs

To run a Perl program from the Unix command line:

perl progname.pl

Alternatively, put this as the first line of your script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

... and run the script as /path/to/script.pl. Of course, it'll need to be executable first, so chmod 755 script.pl (under Unix).

(This start line assumes you have the env program. You can also put directly the path to your perl executable, like in #!/usr/bin/perl).

For more information, including instructions for other platforms such as Windows and Mac OS, read perlrun.