Perl

Practical Extraction and Report Language

-or- Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

From the Wikipedia:

Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. Perl borrows features from a variety of other languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.

Structurally, Perl is based on the brace-delimited block style of AWK and C, and was widely adopted for its strengths in string processing, and lack of the arbitrary limitations of many scripting languages at the time.

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Usefull links
http://search.cpan.org/	Search the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

command line tips

Check the validity of your scripts:

 perl -c <scriptname>

With additional library paths:

 perl -I ../somelib -c <scriptname>

Alter a file by changing all FOO's by BAR's:

 perl -pi -e 's!FOO!BAR!' <filename>

usefull modules

Some modules I find handy

Data::Dumper

let's you dump data structions in a readable format.

Template

Andy Wardley's very workable templating engine.

Storable

Persistence for Perl data structures. Save's a lot of nitpicking with reading and writting files that's don't need to be accessed by anything else then a perlscript e.g. temporary data for CGI's and daemons.

Net::LDAP

A very comprehensive way to work with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol

Sys::Syslog

Perl interface to the UNIX syslog(3) calls. Why bother writting and maintaining logfiles when someones else can do it?

Spreadsheet::WriteExcel

Very easy way to generate excelsheets for e.g. reporting.