Perl Programming

Length: 4 days
CourseID: perl

Prerequisites:

Knowledge of UNIX fundamentals and experience with the UNIX commands and utilities.

Overview:

Perl offers a wide range of functions for programming, system administration, distributed computering and Internet applications.

Objectives:

Learn the fundamentals.

Use command substitution and command history to construct pipeline commands.

Write Perl programs using UNIX utilities to build powerful applications in a short time.

Chapters:

Practical Extraction and Report Language (PERL)

An Introduction

Scalar Data

Scalar Values	Operators
Scalar variables	Operators for scalar variables
Safe coding practices

Arrays and List Data

Array Variables

in Array Context

Branching and Looping

Statement blocks: if/unless, while/until, for

Hashes

Hash - What is it?

Operators: keys, values, each, delete, exists

Input and Output

Input from	print/printf
Here documents

The Power of Regular Expressions

What are regular expressions?	Patterns
Grouping patterns	Matching operator variants
Substitutions	Other operators
Regular expressions options

Functions

System and user-defined functions	Return values and arguments
Variable number of parameters

Loop and Program Flow Modifiers

Filehandles and File Tests

Filehandle - What is it?	Opening/closing a filehandle
Using filehandles	File tests
stat( ) and lstat( ) operators

Formatted Output

Accessing Directories

Moving around the directory tree	Globbing
Directory handles

File and Directory Manipulation

Working with files

Commandline arguments

Managing Operating System Processes

System function	Backquotes
Processes as filehandles	Using the fork and exec functions

String Manipulations and Sorting Numerically

Working with substrings	String manipulation with splice
Formatting data with sprintf	Advanced sorting
Transliteration

Hash Files and Text File Management

DBM databases and DBM arrays	Fixed-length random access databases
Variable-length (text) databases

Odds and Ends