Learning Perl, 5th Edition

How Can I Get Perl?

You probably already have it. At least, we find Perl wherever we go. It ships with many systems, and system administrators often install it on every machine at their site. But if you can’t find it already on your system, you can still get it for free.

Perl is distributed under two different licenses. For most people, because you’ll merely be using it, either license is as good as the other. If you’ll be modifying Perl, however, you’ll want to read the licenses more closely because they put some small restrictions on distributing the modified code. For people who won’t modify Perl, the licenses essentially say, “It’s free—have fun with it.”

In fact, it’s not only free, but it runs rather nicely on nearly everything that calls itself Unix and has a C compiler. You download it, type a command or two, and it starts configuring and building itself. Or, better yet, you get your system administrator to type those two commands and install it for you.^[*] Besides Unix and Unix-like systems, people have also been addicted enough to Perl to port it to other systems, such as Mac OS X, VMS, OS/2, even MS/DOS, and every modern species of Windows—and probably even more by the time you read this.^[†] Many of these ports of Perl come with an installation program that’s even easier to use than the process for installing Perl on Unix. Check for links in the “ports” section on CPAN.

What Is CPAN?

CPAN is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, your one-stop shop for Perl. It has the source ...