Perl

1. Short for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, Perl is an interpreted free and open source programming language first developed by Larry Wall in 1987 that is similar to the C language. Perl is one of the more commonly used languages in writing CGI scripts and programming for Internet and web page applications. Below is an example of a Perl script that prints "Hello World!".

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello World!\n";

Files that include Perl code on a web server may have any type of file extension; however, they commonly end in .CGI, .PL, or .PLX.

If you're running a Linux distro, often Perl will already be installed on the computer. However, if you're using MacOS or Microsoft Windows you'll need to download and install a Perl client. We recommend users try the free download for ActiveState Perl found on the below link.

http://www.activestate.com/

2. Linux command, see our perl command page for additional information and syntax of this command.

Also see: Camel book, Loosely typed language, OSS, POD, PHP, Programming definitions, Regex, Shebang, Tcl