Perl in Linux: A Beginner’s Guide

To use Perl in Linux, you first need to make sure that the Perl interpreter is installed on the system. Most Linux distributions come with Perl pre-installed, you can check if Perl is already installed by entering the following command in the terminal:

perl -v

If Perl is already installed, you can simply run Perl scripts in the terminal, for example:

perl script.pl

The filename of the Perl script is script.pl. If you need to execute a line of Perl code in the command line, you can use the -e option, for example:

perl -e 'print "Hello, World!\n";'

Furthermore, Perl can also be used to write CGI scripts or web applications. In this scenario, the Perl script must be placed in the web server’s CGI directory and ensure that the script has executable permissions. The executable permissions can be set by adding the following line at the beginning of the script file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

Then you can access CGI scripts through a web browser to run Perl code.