Introduction: What do you need?

  1. Why use Perl?
  2. Introduction

Sample Data

Go to http://www.hoboes.com/NetLife/Swine/ to download the resources archive. Inside, you’ll find a text file called “songs.txt”. We’ll be using that in this tutorial.

Text Editor

You will need a text editor, such as Smultron on the Macintosh or NoteTabPro on Windows. If you intend to edit Perl scripts directly on a remote server, you will need familiarity with a Unix text editor such as vi or pico.

If you’re using a GUI text editor, you’ll want to make sure that it saves your files with Unix line endings. It usually won’t matter, but it can sometimes help track down errors.

Terminal or Shell

You will need to be able to execute your scripts. Normally you will do this from some sort of terminal or shell application. If you are running these scripts on a remote server, you will probably use ssh, or secure shell to get to that server. If you are running them on your local Mac OS X workstation, you’ll use the Terminal application in your Utilities folder.

  1. Why use Perl?
  2. Introduction