Introducing Perl
Apress eBooks · 2006
SummaryIn this chapter, we looked at the key features and history of Perl, and saw how to download and install Perl binary distributions. We also examined some of the reasons why we might want to build Perl from source, and the various ways that we can control the features of the resulting Perl interpreter. One significant reason to build Perl from source on Unix systems is to enable support for threads, but there are others too, including 64-bit integer support (even on 32-bit platforms) or customizing the default library search path.Once Perl is installed, we are ready to run Perl applications and scripts. We looked at starting applications on Unix, Windows, and Macintosh platforms, and covered Perl’s many command-line options. Perl is surprisingly versatile run directly from the command line, and we also spent some time looking at Perl’s role as a generic command-line utility.There is more to Perl than the standard Perl distribution, and in the final part of the chapter we looked at CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, and saw how to download and install new modules, either by hand, or using the CPAN module and cpan utility under Unix, or the ppm utility on Windows platforms.