[plug] From 'Perl Query...'

[Matt Kemner]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, Kevin Shackleton wrote:

> So how do normal people pick up Perl?

I picked up Perl by grabbing a couple of fairly simple Perl scripts that
someone else wrote, and which I then tried to understand how they worked
(with extensive help of the perlfunc(1) manpage) and then tried to modify
to see if I understood how they worked (and subsequently broke them, and
fiddled with them until they worked again)

But then I've never been considered "normal" *grin*
 
> I always thought of Perl as a interpreter language under unix that
> solves problems that the shell won't do (or at least easily).

Perl is so much more than that.  One area Perl excels in (and for which it
was specifically written) was data processing and manipulation.

>  However I
> have just been exposed to Perl as an activex type of component under Not
> Terrific - you can't actually run the script directly but have to knock
> up an html front end to call it.

There are some Perl interpreters available for Win* that can be run from
the command line as well as via the web interface.

Under Linux all you need is a 'print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";'
somewhere near the top of the perl script (before you output anything
else) and the script will work equally as a CGI and from the command line.

 - Matt