What is perl programming?

Answer 1

Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall in the late 1980s to assist him in administering UNIX operating system environments. Perl has since been ported to other operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Linux. Perl is widely renowned for its ease of use, power and functionality.

Perl is loosely based on the powerful 'C' programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs in the early 1970s. Perl is used today for a wide variety of tasks including CGI programming, system administration and is also a favorite of both computer security professionals and so called 'hackers'.

Shell scripting is associated with the use of a variety of 'shells' such as the 'Bourne Shell' developed by Stephen Bourne, also of Bell Labs, the 'Korn Shell' developed by David Korn, again while at Bell Labs and other widely used shells such as the ubiquitous 'BASH' shell (Bourne Again SHell) included with virtually every open source operating system such as Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and some closed source ones. Shell scripting has, to some degree, more recently come to be associated with 'batch/cmd file' programming in Windows environments.

A 'Bourne Shell' script will typically begin with the line:

#!/bin/sh

while a 'Perl' script may begin with the line:

#!/usr/bin/perl

Perl has remarkably high performance for a scripting language that is compiled at

runtime. In benchmarks studies, Perl has often been found to run at approximately 90% of the speed of the very high performance C programming language.

Perl supports networking, multi-tasking and other features expected of a modern programming language and also has a considerable body of Unix/Linux administration functions built in (in keeping with it's original focus of being a scripting language designed by a Unix Systems Administrator for Unix Systems Administrators - perhaps most often meaning Linux today, though FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Mac OSX [to name but a few as Perl is ubiquitous and any list of systems supported would be FAR too long to be enumerated here] are equally well supported).

I have written Perl scripts that run in daemon mode for instance, and launch hundreds of child processes performing many varied tasks including network clients and servers.

Perl is Open Source and the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network) body of contributed code and modules is so extensive it's enumeration would be a task nearly encyclopedic in scope - FAR TOO LARGE EVEN FOR AN ONLINE ENCYCLOPEDIA SUCH AS WIKIPEDIA.

In early 2013 if I'm not mistaken, the ISS (International Space Station) switched from Windows to Linux for the announced purpose of increased reliability and stability encompassing dozens of computers - each of which comes equipped with Perl.

And last but not least, writing Perl code is just plain fun. Few, if any programming languages are more portable as Perl has been ported to everything from Microsoft Windows to IBM AIX.

We Linux Systems Administrators are, at least philosophically, indebted to Larry Wall, Randall Schwartz, Nathan Torkington and many others for their profound contributions to the Open Source software arena in the form of Perl.

Answer 2

emacs is an extensible programmable editor; Perl is a scripting language that allows you to write small script programs to do just about anything on the Unix system.