Question: I would like to understand the basics of how to write and execute Perl program on Linux OS. Can you explain it with a simple example?
Answer: In this article, let us review very quickly how to write a basic Hello World Perl program and execute *.pl program on Linux or Unix OS.
1. Write a Hello World Perl Program
Create the helloworld.pl program using a Vim editor as shown below.
$ vim helloworld.pl #!/usr/bin/perl # Hello world perl program print "Hello World!";
2. Make sure Perl Interpreter is installed on your system
Make sure perl interpreter is installed on your system as shown below.
$ whereis perl perl: /usr/bin/perl /etc/perl /usr/lib/perl /usr/share/perl /usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz $ which perl /usr/bin/perl
3. Execute the Perl Program
You can either execute using “perl helloworld.pl” or “./helloworld.pl”.
$ perl helloworld.pl Hello World! ( or ) $ chmod u+x helloworld.pl $ ./helloworld.pl Hello World!
Note: As perl is an interpreted language, you don’t have the compilation step similar to the C program.
4. Writing and Executing Perl One liner
You can also execute perl from the command line as shown below. This will print Hello World!.
perl -e 'print "Hello World!\n"'