Programming Perl

Larry Wall developed the Practical Extraction and Report Language to combine the facilities offered by low level compiling languages such as C with the speed of development offered by shell programming languages such as awk or Korn shell.

The language first appeared in 1987. By 1992 version 4 was a stable product but it was still not achieving its goals. This engendered a complete re-write and version 5 was released in 1994 as a complete solution for the majority of programming tasks on command line systems.


General Tips
Programme Execution Tracing
Removing White Space from the Beginning and End of Strings
Changing Characters in Strings with a Regular Expression
Checking if a Value is a Number
Getting and Formatting Dates and Times
Splitting Delimited Strings
Retrieving Results from External Processes
Parsing Filenames
A Help File Display Subsystem