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| Linux Magazine / DEPARTMENTS / |
Many of us make the mistake of limiting our own vision. We put tools or people in boxes that are too confining. Even experienced Perl programmers sometimes believe, "Perl is great for text filters," or "Unix system administrators should use Perl to automate their work," without seeing that Perl can do much, much more. The fact is that Perl's virtues of expressiveness and concision apply to more than simple text manipulation or sysadmin automation.
Usenet news has been around since 1979. I've been reading news nearly daily since 1980, except for a brief hiatus in 1984 when I missed the "great renaming" that gave us our current Usenet naming scheme. Because news is important (and familiar) to me, it's important for me to read news from a news server that has fairly decent article coverage.
Perl has many ways of launching and managing different programs. This is a Good Thing, because Perl's ability to launch and manage programs -- or child processes -- is one of the reasons it makes such a great "duct-tape of the Internet." The easiest way to launch a child process is with system:
Over the 22 years of my professional writing career (interspersed and overlapped with gigs as a system administrator, security consultant, software engineer, systems tester, video producer, and karaoke KJ), I've written quite a few books, columns, Usenet postings, and e-mail messages. Some have accused me of having some sort of artificial means or program to actually spit out this volume of text. Well, it's time for me to finally 'fess up. Everything I've ever written, including this column, has actually been the product of a series of programs of ever-increasing complexity.
According to the folks who survey such things, the Open Source Apache server is the most popular Web server on the Internet. And Perl is the language of choice for many scripts running on all those Apache servers. But if you really want to get the most out of Perl and Apache, you need to embed Perl directly into your server using Apache's mod_perl extension.
Perl has a lot of cool stuff. Certainly, the basic: print "Hello, world!\n"; gets people started without knowing much about the language, but the question "Is there a way to do (X) in Perl?" can usually be answered "Yes!"
The Perl community is one of the most wellĂ‚Âestablished demonstrations of the Open Source Software movement. Many people that have benefited from Perl's openness have in turn contributed libraries and scripts back to the public for others to use. The collective contributions to the Perl community have been organized into the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, known more commonly as the CPAN.