This is a collection of pages that contain various aspects of both Perl and shell scripts. All code here has been tested and verified as ‘workable’ on a Ubuntu Linux system. Where possible, all sources of information are linked back to the original.

To begin, we shall ask the question ‘What is Perl?’.

(You may see Perl with a capital P and a lower case p, the significance of this is that Perl is the language, perl is the interpreter).

Wikipedia classes Perl as the following:

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall, a linguist working as a systems administrator for NASA, in 1987, as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular amongst programmers. Larry Wall continues to oversee development of the core language, and its upcoming version, Perl 6.

Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, and sed. The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools,facilitating easy manipulation of text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the Web. Perl is nicknamed “the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages” due to its flexibility and adaptability.

Perldoc,perl.org reads Perl as …

Perl is a high-level programming language with an eclectic heritage written by Larry Wall and a cast of thousands. It derives from the ubiquitous C programming language and to a lesser extent from sed, awk, the Unix shell, and at least a dozen other tools and languages. Perl’s process, file, and text manipulation facilities make it particularly well-suited for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and world wide web programming. These strengths make it especially popular with system administrators and CGI script authors, but mathematicians, geneticists, journalists, and even managers also use Perl. Maybe you should, too.

Within these pages we will be touching on C, sed and awk, plus a host of other aspects of Linux / Unix programming and the tools available for use. I like to read computing books, whether it be Linux, Perl or Shell Scripting, we shall also be running through some of the recommended books within this Perlcode site.