PerlStalker's SysAdmin Notes and Tools

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Perl

Perl is the 'Swiss-army chainsaw' of Un*x; it does everything you could want and usually more. It is available for almost every operating system running on almost every platform. Furthermore, Perl is open source, so if it's not available for your system (or doesn't behave how you want it to), you can simply make the changes you need to in the source and build it yourself.

Perl's string handling capabilities surpass almost every language in popular use today. This makes Perl the ideal language for CGI programming, since all data sent from an HTML form is sent as text. Lincoln D. Stein's CGI module, CGI.pm, makes it even easier to build dynamic content into web sites through the CGI protocol.

Need a Web-enabled database? Perl steps up again with the Database Interface module DBI.pm. Through the DBI, Perl programs can talk to any database that has a driver written for Perl. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find any major database that doesn't have a Perl driver. Just take a look in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN). Any driver that has been released is available from the CPAN.

Speaking of the CPAN, you can get any module that has been released through the CPAN. Available modules span the whole spectrum of topics from audio to XML and making stops in scientific graphing, networking, and GUI programming through the TK module. Don't see what you need, write it yourself and post it on the CPAN so everyone can benefit from your work.

Take a look at what Perl can do for you and enjoy.