Introduction
Perl is a interpreted language. It is almost available in all popular operating systems today. Perl will be similar to C language and awk.

Basics

• Perl script file mostly will have the extension .pl
• In unix and Linux flavours, the perl file should have an execution permission.
• Start the perl script file with #!/usr/bin/perl
• Dont forget to terminate perl commands with ; (semicolen). eg., print “Hello world\n”;

program 1

Always the first program I try on any language is hello world, so perl’s hello world program is here for Linux and UNIX flavours,

#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Hello world.\n";

In Windows the same program will look like,

#!D:/perl/perl.exe
print "Hello world.\n";

• The first line (in both examples) is a comment for perl, but for shell it tells which interpriter in what path to use on the file.
• The second command print is similar to printf in C language with some difference. Lets learn the difference later.

Output