Hello, Perl · Perl (free) — The Gold Standard

A Perl 5 script is plain text. The first line is often a shebang so the OS can find the interpreter: #!/usr/bin/env perl. On Windows you usually run perl hello.pl explicitly; the shebang still documents intent.

print "hello\n"; writes text to standard output. Statements end with a semicolon. Double-quoted strings interpret escapes like \n; single-quoted strings stay mostly literal (next lessons).

Save source as a .pl file (or .pm for modules later). From a terminal with Perl installed, run perl hello.pl. perl -v prints the interpreter version — modern introductory work targets Perl 5.

Unlike Python, there is no required indentation for blocks yet, and unlike JavaScript there is no console.log. Start with print and a working shebang path.

Misses: writing print("hello") as the only style (parentheses are optional for builtins), saving as .py, calling node file.pl, or forgetting the semicolon after print.

hello

#!/usr/bin/env perl
print "hello\n";

Match this when you type.

Quiz

What shebang commonly starts a portable Perl script?

#!node
#!/usr/bin/env python
#!/bin/bash only
#!/usr/bin/env perl

Quiz

Which statement writes text to standard output?

echo (shell builtin only)
print
puts (Ruby-only required)
console.log

Quiz

How do you run a Perl file from the CLI?

node file.pl
php file.pl
python file.pl
perl file.pl

Quiz

What file extension do Perl scripts normally use?

.php
.pl
.py
.js

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