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, and is 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.

Written on October 9, 2007
🐫 perl
🧑🏽‍💻 programming
🤤 stupid
🏷 tutorial