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- From: spp@psa.pencom.com
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl.announce,comp.lang.perl.misc,comp.answers,news.answers
- Subject: comp.lang.perl.* FAQ 0/5 - Introduction
- Followup-To: poster
- Date: 27 Jan 1996 01:21:04 GMT
- Organization: Pencom Systems Administration
- Lines: 223
- Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.EDU
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-
- Archive-name: perl-faq/part0
- Version: $Id: perl-intro,v 2.8 1995/05/15 15:43:59 spp Exp spp $
- Posting-Frequency: bi-weekly
- Last Edited: Thu Jan 11 00:52:58 1996 by spp (Stephen P Potter) on syrinx.psa.com
-
- Hear ye, hear ye. This most honourable session on Perl Frequently Asked
- Questions is hereby called to order. Please stand and show your respect
- for those that have gone before us. Let us honour Larry Wall*, the father
- of Perl who unselfishly spends vast amounts of time reviewing this document
- for veracity and accuracy. Let us also honour Tom Christiansen* without
- whom this document would not exist. Finally, let us collectively honour
- the members of comp.lang.perl.misc who have offered much advice and
- corrections to this list.
-
- This article details the contents of the most Frequently Asked Questions in
- comp.lang.perl.misc, a Usenet newsgroup devoted to the Perl programming
- language. There are five pieces following this, the general information
- questions in part1, part2 and part3 and the programming ones in part4 and
- part5.
-
- If this is your first exposure to Perl, please read this document and the
- perl(1) man page before asking questions in comp.lang.perl.misc. If you're
- using v4 perl, that page contains all you need to know (or at least enough
- to get started). If you're using v5 perl, that page will show you where to
- look for specific information. When we refer to perlmod(1), it means the
- "perlmod" man page in section "1" of the manual, just as Foo(3pm), that
- means it's the "Foo" man page in section "3pm" (perl modules) of the
- library. The perl install does NOT automatically install the module man
- pages for you, however.
-
- Hopefully the questions herein are asked enough that considerable net
- bandwidth can be saved by looking here before asking. Also, hopefully
- there is enough information contained here that someone who has never
- heard of Perl can read this and at least have some sort of idea as to what
- Perl is.
-
- Some questions in this group aren't really about Perl, but rather about
- system-specific issues. You might also consult the Most Frequently Asked
- Questions list in comp.unix.questions for answers to this type of question.
-
- The current version of perl is 5.001, perl 5.000 emerged into the world on
- 16 October, 1994. The previous non-beta version was 4.036 (version 4,
- patchlevel 36). Many of these questions were written for perl4, however a
- lot of perl5 information has also been added. Perl5 only features will be
- clearly marked as such, so as not to cause confusion for those still using
- perl4. You should upgrade to perl5 as soon as possible though (see below).
-
- This list was initially written, and still hacked upon, by Tom
- Christiansen*. However, due to his erratic schedule, it is currently
- maintained by Stephen P Potter*. First person singular pronouns, when not
- in quoted postings, generally are Tom talking.
-
- This document, and all its parts, are Copyright (c) 1994/1995, Stephen P
- Potter and Tom Christiansen, perlfaq@perl.com. All rights reservered.
- Permisson to distribute this collection, in part or full, via electronic
- means (emailed, posted or archived) or printed copy are granted providing
- that no charges are involved, reasonable attempt is made to use the most
- current version, and all credits and copyright notices are retained.
- Requests for other distribution rights, including incorporation in
- commercial products, such as books, magazine articles, or CD-ROMs should be
- made to perlfaq@perl.com.
-
- This FAQ is archived on ftp.cis.ufl.edu [128.227.100.198] in the file
- pub/perl/doc/FAQ, as well as on rtfm.mit.edu [18.181.0.24] in
- /pub/usenet/comp.lang.perl.*. If you have any suggested additions or
- corrections to this article, please send them to <perlfaq@perl.com>.
-
-
- Part 1 - General Information and Availability
- 1.1) What is Perl?
- 1.2) What are perl4 and perl5, are there any differences?
- 1.3) What features does perl5 provide over perl4?
- 1.4) Where can I get docs on perl5?
- 1.5) Will perl5 break my perl4 scripts?
- 1.6) When will Perl stabilize?
- 1.7) What's the difference between "perl" and "Perl"?
- 1.8) Is it a perl program or a perl script?
- 1.9) Is perl difficult to learn?
- 1.10) Should I program everything in perl?
- 1.11) How does perl compare with other scripting languages, like Tcl,
- Python or REXX?
- 1.12) Where can I get Perl over the Internet (FTP)?
- 1.13) How can I get Perl via email?
- 1.14) How can I get Perl via UUCP?
- 1.15) Are there other ways of getting perl?
- 1.16) Has perl been ported to machine FOO?
- 1.17) How do I get perl to compile on Solaris?
- 1.18) How do I get perl to compile on a NeXT?
- 1.19) What extensions are available for Perl and where can I get them?
- 1.20) What is dbperl and where can I get it?
- 1.21) Which DBM should I use?
- 1.22) Is there an SNMP aware perl?
- 1.23) Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?
-
-
- Part 2 - Informational Sources
- 2.1) Is there a USENET group for perl?
- 2.2) Have any books or magazine articles been published about perl?
- 2.3) When will the Camel and Llama books be updated?
- 2.4) What FTP resources are available?
- 2.5) What WWW/gopher resources are available?
- 2.6) Can people who don't have access to USENET get comp.lang.perl.misc?
- 2.7) Are archives of comp.lang.perl.* available?
- 2.8) Is there a WAIS server for comp.lang.perl.*?
- 2.9) What other sources of information about Perl or training are available?
- 2.10) Where can I get training classes on Perl?
- 2.11) What companies ship or use perl?
- 2.12) Is there commercial, third-party support for perl?
- 2.13) What is a JAPH? What does "Will hack perl for ..." mean?
- 2.14) Where can I get a collection of Larry Wall witticisms?
- 2.15) What are the known bugs?
- 2.16) Where should I post bugs?
- 2.17) Where should I post source code?
- 2.18) Where can I learn about object-orienting Perl programming?
- 2.19) Where can I learn about linking C with Perl? [h2xs, xsubpp]
- 2.20) What is perl.com?
- 2.21) What do the asterisks (*) throughout the FAQ stand for?
-
-
- Part 3 - Programming Aids
- 3.1) How do I use perl interactively?
- 3.2) Is there a perl profiler?
- 3.3) Is there a yacc for perl?
- 3.4) Is there a pretty printer (similar to indent(1)) for perl?
- 3.5) How can I convert my perl scripts directly to C or compile them into
- binary form?
- 3.6) Where can I get a perl mode for emacs?
- 3.7) Is there a perl shell?
- 3.8) How can I use curses with perl?
- 3.9) How can I use X or Tk with perl?
- 3.10) Can I dynamically load C user routines?
- 3.11) What is undump and where can I get it?
- 3.12) How can I get '#!perl' to work under MS-DOS?
- 3.13) Can I write useful perl programs on the command line?
- 3.14) What's a "closure"?
-
-
- Part 4 - General Programming, Regular Expressions (Regexp) and I/O
- 4.1) What are all these $@%*<> signs and how do I know when to use them?
- 4.2) Why do Perl operators have different precedence than C operators?
- 4.3) What's the difference between dynamic and static (lexical) scoping?
- 4.4) What's the difference between deep and shallow binding?
- 4.5) How can I manipulate fixed-record-length files?
- 4.6) How can I make a file handle local to a subroutine?
- 4.7) How can I sleep or alarm for under a second?
- 4.8) How can I do an atexit() or setjmp()/longjmp()? (Exception handling)
- 4.9) How can I catch signals?
- 4.10) Why isn't my octal data interpretted correctly?
- 4.11) How can I compare two date strings?
- 4.12) How can I find the Julian Day?
- 4.13) Does perl have a round function? What about ceil() and floor()?
- 4.14) What's the fastest way to code up a given task in perl?
- 4.15) Do I always/never have to quote my strings or use semicolons?
- 4.16) What is variable suicide and how can I prevent it?
- 4.17) What does "Malformed command links" mean?
- 4.18) How can I set up a footer format to be used with write()?
- 4.19) Why does my program keep growing in size?
- 4.20) Can I do RPC?
- 4.21) Why doesn't my sockets program work under System V (Solaris)? What
- does the error message "Protocol not supported" mean?
- 4.22) How can I quote a variable to use in a regexp?
- 4.23) How can I change the first N letters of a string?
- 4.24) How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a
- string?
- 4.25) Can I use Perl regular expressions to match balanced text?
- 4.26) What does it mean that regexps are greedy? How can I get around it?
- 4.27) How do I use a regular expression to strip C style comments from a
- file?
- 4.28) How can I split a [character] delimited string except when inside
- [character]?
- 4.29) Why doesn't "local($foo) = <FILE>;" work right?
- 4.30) How can I detect keyboard input without reading it?
- 4.31) How can I read a single character from the keyboard under UNIX and DOS?
- 4.32) How can I get input from the keyboard without it echoing to the
- screen?
- 4.33) Is there any easy way to strip blank space from the beginning/end of
- a string?
- 4.34) How can I output my numbers with commas added?
- 4.35) How do I expand tags in a string?
- 4.36) What's wrong with grep in a void context?
-
-
- Part 5 - Arrays and Shell and External Program Interactions
- 5.1) What is the difference between $array[1] and @array[1]?
- 5.2) How can I make an array of arrays or other recursive data types?
- 5.3) How can I make an array of structures containing various data types?
- 5.4) How can I extract just the unique elements of an array?
- 5.5) How can I tell whether an array contains a certain element?
- 5.6) How can I sort an associative array by value instead of by key?
- 5.7) How can I know how many entries are in an associative array?
- 5.8) What's the difference between "delete" and "undef" with %arrays?
- 5.9) Why don't backticks work as they do in shells?
- 5.10) Why does my converted awk/sed/sh script run more slowly in perl?
- 5.11) How can I call my system's unique C functions from perl?
- 5.12) Where do I get the include files to do ioctl() or syscall()? [h2ph]
- 5.13) Why do setuid perl scripts complain about kernel problems?
- 5.14) How can I open a pipe both to and from a command?
- 5.15) How can I capture STDERR from an external command?
- 5.16) Why doesn't open() return an error when a pipe open fails?
- 5.17) Why can't my script read from STDIN after I gave it ^D (EOF)?
- 5.18) How can I translate tildes (~) in a filename?
- 5.19) How can I convert my shell script to perl?
- 5.20) Can I use perl to run a telnet or ftp session?
- 5.21) Why do I sometimes get an "Argument list to long" when I use <*>?
- 5.22) How do I do a "tail -f" in perl?
- 5.23) Is there a way to hide perl's command line from programs such as "ps"?
- 5.24) I {changed directory, modified my environment} in a perl script. How
- come the change disappeared when I exited the script? How do I get
- my changes to be visible?
- 5.25) How can I pass a filehandle to a function, or make a list of
- filehandles?
- 5.26) How can I open a file with a leading ">" or trailing blanks?
- 5.27) How can I tell if a variable is tainted?
- --
- Stephen P Potter Pencom Systems Administration Beaching It
- spp@psa.pencom.com Pager: 1-800-759-8888, 547-9561 Work: 703-860-2222
- Cthulhu for President in '96: When You're Tired of the Lesser of Two Evils
- --
- Stephen P Potter Pencom Systems Administration Beaching It
- spp@psa.pencom.com Pager: 1-800-759-8888, 547-9561 Work: 703-860-2222
- "I don't care whether people actually like Perl, just so long as they *think*
- they like it... ;-)" -Larry Wall
-