Perl 5.8.0

Perl -- Practical Extraction and Report Language -- is a high-level programming language. Perl combines some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh. It is used for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. Perl's process, file, and text manipulation facilities can be applied for tasks involving quick prototyping, system utilities, software tools, system management tasks, database access, graphical programming, networking, and World Wide Web programming. It is popular with system administrators and CGI script authors.

Note: as of December 2006 the version of Perl on Ovid is 5.6.0 but will change to 5.8.0 early in 2007.

Perl also works with many system and vendor modules. Here is a list of those Perl modules supported by UW Technology .

An update was recently installed. Information about what's new in version 5.8.0 is available.

Using the Software
You will find it useful to peruse Perl manuals and tutorials. If you use Perl on the Uniform Access computers, the path to the Perl interpreter should be specified in the first line of your program as:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

To determine the default version of the language you will be using, type the following command at the system prompt:

% perl -v

Documentation
Some Perl documentation is available on the World Wide Web.

Technical Support
Help is available from UW Technology. Send a question to help@u.washington.edu if you need help with this software.

Additional resources are the Perl Tutorials and Perl FAQs.

(software updated 12/21/2005)