If you’re a web page designer and you’re interested in programming, for example, you’re probably already using PHP. What makes Perl useful instead of PHP? The answer is the command line. Perl excels as filter and as glue. It is great at taking some input—usually text—and modifying it. It acts as a great text sausage machine, grinding up text and spitting it out.
Perl also makes for a great glue tying together the various command line programs you use and automating your use of them. Perl scripts are often used as cron jobs, running automatically at specified times. Perl is a great way of taking what you want to give your command line program and converting it into what the command line program expects. It is great at mediating between two or more data sources.
If you manage a web site or a MySQL database and need regular backups and monitoring, or if you need to regularly collect and collate data from a set of files, Perl is a great tool to know. If your task is a series of changes—if you can think of it as a series of sieves or as an assembly line of tasks—Perl can provide rapid automation for that task.
Related Pages
