Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

Hour 11. System Interaction

All the Perl you've learned up until now has been fairly self-contained: If you wanted something done, you had to do it yourself—sorting data, creating directory listings, divining configuration information, and so on. The problem is that it's a lot of work, and you're repeating work that might have been done elsewhere.

One of the current buzzwords being touted about Perl is that it's an excellent glue language. What this means is that Perl can use other programs that are installed with your operating system as components, connecting them together to create larger programs. It can start your OS utilities and use them to gather information, interact with you, and then shut them down.

Perl can glue together these smaller ...