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perl



NAME

perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

SYNOPSIS

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)
    perlfaq		Perl frequently asked questions
    perltoc		Perl documentation table of contents
    perlbook		Perl book information

    perlsyn		Perl syntax
    perldata		Perl data structures
    perlop		Perl operators and precedence
    perlsub		Perl subroutines
    perlfunc		Perl builtin functions
    perlreftut		Perl references short introduction
    perldsc		Perl data structures intro
    perlrequick		Perl regular expressions quick start
    perlpod		Perl plain old documentation
    perlstyle		Perl style guide
    perltrap		Perl traps for the unwary

    perlrun		Perl execution and options
    perldiag		Perl diagnostic messages
    perllexwarn		Perl warnings and their control
    perldebtut		Perl debugging tutorial
    perldebug		Perl debugging

    perlvar		Perl predefined variables
    perllol		Perl data structures: arrays of arrays
    perlopentut		Perl open() tutorial
    perlretut		Perl regular expressions tutorial

    perlre		Perl regular expressions, the rest of the story
    perlref		Perl references, the rest of the story

    perlform		Perl formats

    perlboot		Perl OO tutorial for beginners
    perltoot		Perl OO tutorial, part 1
    perltootc		Perl OO tutorial, part 2
    perlobj		Perl objects
    perlbot		Perl OO tricks and examples
    perltie		Perl objects hidden behind simple variables

    perlipc		Perl interprocess communication
    perlfork		Perl fork() information
    perlnumber		Perl number semantics
    perlthrtut		Perl threads tutorial

    perlport		Perl portability guide
    perllocale		Perl locale support
    perlunicode		Perl unicode support
    perlebcdic		Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms

    perlsec		Perl security

    perlmod		Perl modules: how they work
    perlmodlib		Perl modules: how to write and use
    perlmodinstall	Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
    perlnewmod		Perl modules: preparing a new module for distribution

    perlfaq1		General Questions About Perl
    perlfaq2		Obtaining and Learning about Perl
    perlfaq3		Programming Tools
    perlfaq4		Data Manipulation
    perlfaq5		Files and Formats
    perlfaq6		Regexes
    perlfaq7		Perl Language Issues
    perlfaq8		System Interaction
    perlfaq9		Networking

    perlcompile		Perl compiler suite intro

    perlembed		Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
    perldebguts		Perl debugging guts and tips
    perlxstut		Perl XS tutorial
    perlxs		Perl XS application programming interface
    perlclib		Internal replacements for standard C library functions
    perlguts		Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
    perlcall		Perl calling conventions from C
    perlutil		utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
    perlfilter		Perl source filters
    perldbmfilter	Perl DBM filters
    perlapi		Perl API listing (autogenerated)
    perlintern		Perl internal functions (autogenerated)
    perlapio		Perl internal IO abstraction interface
    perltodo		Perl things to do
    perlhack		Perl hackers guide

    perlhist		Perl history records
    perldelta		Perl changes since previous version
    perl5005delta	Perl changes in version 5.005
    perl5004delta	Perl changes in version 5.004

    perlaix		Perl notes for AIX
    perlamiga		Perl notes for Amiga
    perlbs2000		Perl notes for POSIX-BC BS2000
    perlcygwin		Perl notes for Cygwin
    perldos		Perl notes for DOS
    perlepoc		Perl notes for EPOC
    perlhpux		Perl notes for HP-UX
    perlmachten		Perl notes for Power MachTen
    perlmpeix		Perl notes for MPE/iX
    perlos2		Perl notes for OS/2
    perlos390		Perl notes for OS/390
    perlsolaris 	Perl notes for Solaris
    perlvmesa		Perl notes for VM/ESA
    perlvms		Perl notes for VMS
    perlvos		Perl notes for Stratus VOS
    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.dir

If 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.

DESCRIPTION

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 the perlhist manpage), Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite that provides the following additional benefits:

Okay, that's definitely enough hype.

AVAILABILITY

Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually all Unix-like platforms. See the section on Supported Platforms in the perlport manpage for a listing.

ENVIRONMENT

See the perlrun manpage.

AUTHOR

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 .

FILES

 "@INC"			locations of perl libraries

SEE ALSO

 a2p	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 Archive

DIAGNOSTICS

The use warnings pragma (and the -w switch) produces some lovely diagnostics.

See the perldiag manpage 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 the perlsec manpage.

Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the -w switch?

BUGS

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.org . 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.

NOTES

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.


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