tchrist@convex.com (Tom Christiansen) (11/07/90)
I've just posted the first in a monthly posting of most frequently asked questions about perl to the comp.lang.perl newsgroup. Answers to the following questions are included: 1) What is Perl? 2) Where can I get Perl? 3) How can I get Perl via UUCP? 4) Where can I get documentation and examples for Perl? 5) Are archives of comp.lang.perl available? 6) Is Perl available for machine FOO? 7) What are all these $@%<> signs and how do I know when to use them? 8) Why don't backticks work as they do in shells? 9) How come Perl operators have different precedence than C operators? 10) How come my converted awk/sed/sh script runs more slowly in Perl? 11) There's an a2p and an s2p; why isn't there a p2c? 12) Where can I get undump for my machine? 13) How can I call my system's unique functions from Perl? 14) Where do I get the include files to do ioctl() or syscall()? 15) Why doesn't "local($foo) = <FILE>;" work right? 16) How can I detect keyboard input without reading it? 17) How do I make an array of arrays? 18) How can I quote a variable to use in a regexp? 19) Why do setuid Perl scripts complain about kernel problems? 20) How do I open a pipe both to and from a command? 21) How can I change the first N letters of a string? --tom