Perl Scripting

What is Perl?

Perl, created, written, developed, and maintained by Larry Wall (lwall@netlabs.com), is a language for processing text. Sounds pretty harmless, doesn't it? Perhaps at one time it was pretty harmless, but in its present state, with its sophisticated pattern matching capabilities, straightforward I/O, and flexible syntax, Perl is anything but harmless. In fact, by borrowing heavily from C, sed, awk, and the Unix shells, Perl has become the language of choice for many I/O, file processing and management, process management, and system administration tasks.

What does "Perl" stand for?

"Perl" is an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language," although Larry has been known to claim that it really stands for "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister."