perl [options] filename args

     Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi-
     trary  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,  effi-
     cient,  complete)  rather  than  beautiful  (tiny,  elegant,
     minimal).  It 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  quite  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 hash tables used by associative
     arrays grow as necessary to  prevent  degraded  performance.
     Perl  uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan
     large amounts of data very quickly.  Although optimized  for
     scanning  text, perl can also deal with binary data, and can
     make dbm files look like associative arrays  (where  dbm  is
     available).   Setuid  perl scripts are safer than C programs
     through a dataflow tracing  mechanism  which  prevents  many
     stupid  security  holes.   If  you have a problem that would
     ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their  capa-
     bilities  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.  OK, enough hype.

     This manual applies only to the MS-DOS  version.   Unix-only
     features  are  mentioned  but are not fully documented here.
     The MS-DOS version of perl attempts to  duplicate  the  Unix
     version's functionality but is crippled by MS-DOS and by the
     severe memory limitations MS-DOS imposes.  The  MS-DOS  ver-
     sion is nevertheless useful for text processing and for lim-
     ited applications involving subprocess management.