Pearl, What is it?
Igor Metz
metz at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Sep 13 17:46:40 AEST 1990
In article <1990Sep11.211401.1556 at ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz>,
russell at ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (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.)
The correct name of this thing is PERL.
Larry Wall, the author, says it in the manpage for perl:
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.
If you have ftp access to the internet, then you can get perl from
jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov [128.149.1.143].
The is also a newsgroup about PERL: comp.lang.perl
|>It looks like a powerful tool for doing admin work!
It really is :-)
Igor Metz
Institut fuer Informatik und angew. Mathematik, Universitaet Bern, Switzerland.
domainNet: metz at iam.unibe.ch Phone: (0041) 31 65 49 90
ARPA: metz%iam.unibe.ch at relay.cs.net Fax: (0041) 31 65 39 65
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