Standard Library Reference, Functions & Ready-to-Run Code Examples
Part of The Direct Path to Linux Ubuntu
— free for all students and developers.
Perl's regex engine is the most powerful in any language — it's what made Perl the original glue language of the internet.
CGI scripts, log parsing, sysadmin automation — Perl has powered Unix admin tasks for 35+ years and still runs millions of servers.
CPAN is the largest and oldest module repository — a module for virtually every task imaginable, all free.
perl -e and perl -n turn Perl into a Swiss army knife for command-line text processing, replacing awk and sed.
Run a Perl program:
perl script.pl # run Perl script perl -e 'print "Hi\n"' # one-liner execution perl -c script.pl # syntax check perl -w script.pl # run with warnings perl -d script.pl # debug mode perl -n -e 'print if /pat/' file # process file lines perl -i -pe 's/old/new/g' f # in-place edit (like sed -i) cpan install DBI # install CPAN module cpanm Module::Name # install with cpanminus perldoc perlfunc # read Perl docs
