[comp.unix.admin] Perl

merlyn@iwarp.intel.com (Randal Schwartz) (09/13/90)

In article <1990Sep11.211401.1556@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>, russell@ccu1 (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.)
| 
| It looks like a powerful tool for doing admin work!

A public reply, in case there are other lurkers with the same request...

Perl is a freely available (under the GNU Copyleft) program written by
Larry Wall, the author of the 'rn' newsreader (and a prolific hacker
and writer, I might add).

Perl is a mixture of sed, awk, sh, C, and your favorite wishlist.
It's best at handling nearly any task that you would have used a
convoluted shell script for, and then some.  It's also *very*
portable, thanks to a fairly robust Configure script-- it's even
running on MS-DOS.

Well, here, let me quote the manpage...

NAME
     perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

DESCRIPTION
     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.


Perl can be fetched anon-ftp from devvax.jpl.nasa.gov:/pub/perl.3.0,
as well as anon-uucp from osu-cis.  Many other sites also stock Perl.
Perl was posted to comp.sources.unix a while back.

Support is excellent.  Perl has its own newsgroup "comp.lang.perl" and
mailing list "perl-users-request@virginia.edu".  Larry reads and posts
frequently, and in his spare time even answers private mail questions.
He's fast to respond to bugs/feature-wishlists.  (Perl 3.0 is already
at patchlevel 28 after having been released only 9 months ago.)

Perl comes with a 70-page manpage, and will soon be documented in a
Nutshell Handbook with over 200 pages of full examples, detailed
descriptions of operations, tutorials, and cookbook-style Perl
recipes.

Read (and post to!) comp.lang.perl for further information.

print "Just another Perl hacker,"
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| merlyn@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon, home of the California Raisins!"=/