Shaji Kalidasan Principal Technical Consultant Skycirrus Technologies www.skycirrus.

com

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What is Perl like?

Perl is a general purpose programming language

developed in 1987 by Larry Wall. It has become the language of choice for WWWdevelopment, System Administration, text processing, Internet services, mail filtering, graphical programming, and every other task requiring portable and easily-developed solutions. Perl is interpreted. This means that as soon as you write your program, you can run it -- theres no mandatory compilation phase. The same Perl program can run on Unix, Windows, NT, MacOS, DOS, OS/2, VMS and the Amiga.
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 For years, Perl has been the scripting language of

choice for many system administrators. There are many factors which have influenced this choice. Some of these are: Excellent text manipulation capabilities. Perl excels at manipulating log files and other regular data. This makes it easy to automate much of the general house keeping associated with system maintenance. It also makes it easy to extract data and trends from different kinds of application log files.
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 CPAN. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network,

gives Perl almost infinite extensibility, full database connectivity and Unicode support. There are literally thousands of third party modules to solve all sorts of different problems. If you have a task to fulfil then chances are reasonable that someone else has already done some of it for you.

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 Perl is open for business. Thousands of corporations rely on

Perl for their information processing needs. Perl is simple to learn. Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible. Perl handles tedious tasks for you, such as memory allocation and garbage collection. Perl is concise. Many programs that would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other programming languages can be expressed in a page of Perl. Perl is object oriented. Inheritance, polymorphism, and encapsulation are all provided by Perls object oriented capabilities.
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 Perl is flexible. The Perl motto is "theres more than

one way to do it." The language doesnt force a particular style of programming on you. Write what comes naturally. Perl is fun. Programming is meant to be fun, not only in the satisfaction of seeing our well-tuned programs do our bidding, but in the literary act of creative writing that yields those programs. With Perl, the journey is as enjoyable as the destination.

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 DBI. Perls Database interface supports a wide range of

third party databases. Further it presents a consistent interface for each. Using this module simplifies the management of disparate database platforms. Portability. Perl exists on more than 30 different operating systems. This allows well written code to be developed on one platform and deployed across many, simplifying automation tasks.

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 Speed. Perl is fast to write and fast to run, making it

perfect for small once-off tasks. Yet Perl is also great for large projects with support for full test coverage, documentation and modules. Documentation. Perl has extensive documentation freely available. This is one of Perls biggest assets. Every built in function comes with a full description and many with usage examples. Perls modules also come with extensive documentation as well as test suites and example code.
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 Familiarity. Much of what can be done in bash, sed,

awk and C can be transferred almost directly into Perl code. Likewise the format of many functions are equivalent to common Unix commands. Low-level access. As well as allowing access to highlevel functionality, Perl makes it easy to work directly with hardware, sockets and to fulfil other low-level requirements.

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 Freedom. Perl is licenced under both the Artistic

license and the GNU Public License and is freely available.

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