Perl

From DWIKI

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.


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

Sys::Syslog

Spreadsheet::WriteExcel