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Unix System Administration Handbook 1997 October
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INDEX ENTRY FOR PERL:
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Name: Perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
Version: 4.036, 5.004.03
Author(s): Larry Wall <lwall@sems.com>
On the CD-ROM in: gnu/perl4.tar, gnu/perl5.tar, gnu/perlref5.tar
Ftp source: ftp.funet.fi:/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/src
CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, is one of the
best-organized and most widely replicated archive sites on the
Internet. ftp.funet.fi is the master site, but the automated
multiplexing service at http://www.perl.com/CPAN can help you connect
automatically to a nearby CPAN mirror site.
Size on the CD: 12.2 MB (uncompressed)
Description:
Perl is an interpreted 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). 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 scan-
ning 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 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. OK, enough hype.
-- Quoted from the manpage by Larry Wall in the perl-4.036 distribution.
Advertised architectures:
Not enumerated, numerous architectures referenced in
installation scripts
Prerequisites: C compiler