Introduction to Perl

Introduction to Perl

Perl is a interpreted language. It is almost available in all popular operating systems today. Perl will be similar to C language and awk.

Basics

Perl script file mostly will have the extension .pl
In unix and Linux flavours, the perl file should have an execution permission.
Start the perl script file with #!/usr/bin/perl
Dont forget to terminate perl commands with ; (semicolen). eg., print “Hello worldn”;

Program 1

Always the first program I try on any language is hello world, so perl’s hello world program is here for Linux and UNIX flavors,

#!/usr/bin/perl

print “Hello world.n”;

In Windows the same program will look like,

#!D:/perl/perl.exe

print “Hello world.n”;

The first line (in both examples) is a comment for perl, but for shell it tells which interpriter in what path to use on the file.
The second command print is similar to printf in C language with some difference. Let’s learn the difference later.

Syntax to run Perl programs

perl <program name> <arguments>

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