Return to Top perl-5.005.02 Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extraction information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical, easy to use, efficient and complete. Perl combines some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax.
Recursion is of unlimited depth.
And the tables used by hashes grow as necessary to prevent degraded per- formance. Perl uses sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very quickly. Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look like hashes. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.