Purpose

Now that we've played with awk, sed, and various shell scripting tricks, it's time to look at the Swiss Army knife of Unix systems: perl. Alternately known as the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, or the Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.

Perl is system-agnostic: it's been ported to Windows, is available for all forms of *nix, and was once the dominant language for CGI/web work. Now, however, it's primary forte is parsing big chunks of text -- something that system administrators routinely need to do.

• why perl?
• perl variables: scalars
• perl variables: arrays
• perl variables: hashes
• control loops
• reading files
• comparisons and regexps
This week's lab