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.
| Useful 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>
useful modules
Some modules I find handy
Data::Dumper
lets you dump data structions in a readable format.
Template
Andy Wardley's very workable templating engine.
Mason
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.
