Ubuntu Unleashed 2013 Edition: Covering 12.10 and 13.04, Eighth Edition

Using Perl with Linux

Although originally designed as a data-extraction and report-generation language, Perl appeals to many Linux system administrators because they can use it to create utilities that fill a gap between the capabilities of shell scripts and compiled C programs (see Chapter 12, “Automating Tasks and Shell Scripting,” and Chapter 40, “C/C++ Programming Tools for Ubuntu”). Another advantage of Perl over other UNIX tools is that it can process and extract data from binary files, whereas sed and awk cannot.

Note

In Perl, “there is more than one way to do it.” This is the unofficial motto of Perl, and it comes up so often that it is usually abbreviated as TIMTOWTDI.

You can use Perl at your shell’s command line to execute one-line ...