russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) (09/12/90)
I noticed the two scripts posted in response to a request for reaper programs were Pearl scripts. We are relatively new to UNIX an I have not come across Pearl before. Could some kind soul please send me a brief description of Pearl, and information on where to get it. (Or a pointer to where I can get the information.) It looks like a powerful tool for doing admin work! Thanks,Russell. --
metz@iam.unibe.ch (Igor Metz) (09/13/90)
In article <1990Sep11.211401.1556@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>, russell@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell J Fulton;ccc032u) writes: |>I noticed the two scripts posted in response to a request for reaper programs |>were Pearl scripts. We are relatively new to UNIX an I have not come across |>Pearl before. Could some kind soul please send me a brief description of |>Pearl, and information on where to get it. (Or a pointer to where I can get |>the information.) The correct name of this thing is PERL. Larry Wall, the author, says it in the manpage for perl: Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbi- trary 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, effi- cient, 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 scanning 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 capa- bilities 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. If you have ftp access to the internet, then you can get perl from jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov [128.149.1.143]. The is also a newsgroup about PERL: comp.lang.perl |>It looks like a powerful tool for doing admin work! It really is :-) Igor Metz Institut fuer Informatik und angew. Mathematik, Universitaet Bern, Switzerland. domainNet: metz@iam.unibe.ch Phone: (0041) 31 65 49 90 ARPA: metz%iam.unibe.ch@relay.cs.net Fax: (0041) 31 65 39 65