Programming

Why I Love Perl

A quick intro to Perl. I know, I know, it’s ancient. So am I.

This article was originally published at my old APLawrence.com Unix articles site in March of 2000 with the title “Why I Love Perl”. I’ve updated and revised it for Medium.

The Perl language is old, but I use it every day. It’s friendly, and easy to learn, at least at a basic level. The web is full of articles and resources for Perl as well as many useful scripts. If you are trying to do something, a search for “Perl” plus whatever you need to do almost always returns results.

This is not intended to be a tutorial. It’s more of a taste so that you can see some of the basic features Perl provides.

This article is written for people who have at least some experience writing shell scripts or who have at least a basic understanding of another programming or scripting language. To understand it, you will need to have Perl installed so that you can test these ideas for yourself and see what happens. MacOS and Linux come with Perl and it is easily installed for Windows.

This is command line stuff. I use it for tearing apart files to extract what I want, for creating web pages, for accessing web pages behind the scenes, and much more.

Note: This is for Perl 5. I never used Perl 6 and I’d venture a guess that not many other people have used it. Most of what you’ll find about Perl will be for Perl 5.