文档介绍：How PERL Works
by Marshall Brain
PERL is a fairly straightforward, widely known and well-respected scripting language. It is used
for a variety of tasks (for example, you can use it to create the equivalent of DOS batch files or C
shell scripts), but in the context of Web development it is used to develop CGI scripts.
One of the nice things about PERL is that, because it is a scripting language, people give away
source code for their programs. This gives you the opportunity to learn PERL by example, and
you can also download and modify thousands of PERL scripts for your own use. One of the bad
things about PERL is that much of this free code is impossible to understand. PERL lends itself to
an unbelievably cryptic style!
This article assumes that you already know how to program (if you know the C programming
language, this will be especially easy for you). PERL is easy to use once you know the basics. In
this edition of HowStuffWorks, we're going to start at the beginning and show you how to do the
mon programming tasks using PERL. By the end of this article, you will be able to write
your own PERL scripts with relative ease, and read cryptic scripts written by others with
somewhat less ease, but this will be a good starting point.
Getting Started
To start with PERL you need the PERL interpreter. On any UNIX machine there is a -
percent pr