yet another wretched perl tutorial
Sorry, I mean “PERL tutorial.” I guess there are so many of these that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but I found yet another one today while looking for some JavaScript docs. Seriously, why isn’t there a really good installable JS reference yet?
Anyway, some highlights:
Scalars are very straight forward. Notice that we used a period (.) between each of our variables. This is a special kind of operator that temporarily appends one string to another.
In case you were wondering:
&&is for numbers,andis for strings
I generally start with, ready?? okay!!:
The first line of every PERL script is a commented line directed toward the PERL interpreter.
What sigil do I need for URL variables?
Files with special characters or unusual names are best opened by first declaring the URL as a variable. This method removes any confusion that might occur as PERL tries to interpret the code. Tildas in filenames however require a brief character substitution step before they can be placed into your open statements.
I’m glad I don’t have to deal with CHMOD values myself.
With sysopen you may also set hexidecimal priviledges; CHMOD values. Sysopen also requires the declaration of a new module for PERL. We will be using the Fcntl module for now, more on this later. Below we have created a basic HTML (myhtml.html) file.
Perl tracks the first line you print, apparently:
We have to introduce some HTTP headers so that PERL understands we are working with a web browser.
It’s more precise not to pass in a list, I guess. Maybe it saves us from checking return values:
foreach $file (@files) {
unlink($file);
}
My favorite, though, was the “qw operator.” You know. It produces a list.
Oh, and of course nothing uses strict.