You have to start somewhere.
If your just starting out no matter what the language your probably going to start with a very basic program and then learn from there. We call this a “Hello World” Script. here is an example of a hello world script in written in Perl.
First create a new file using vi
vi helloWorld.pl
Every perl script starts with a header. I also recommend you use a few modules called warnings and strict as well. Add these lines to the beginning of your file.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
Now you have the beginnings of a Perl script, but it doesn’t do anything. So lets add a basic function, print, to our script. The line is very simple. It will print out Hello World follow by a newline.
Add the following lines to your script:
print "Hello World!\n";
Save and Exit your file and then make it executable:
chmod +x helloWorld.pl
Now run the script and you should get this output:
./helloWorld.pl
Hello World
There you have a simple Hello World perl script. Like I said its very basic but shows you how to get started with perl. In the coming chapters we will cover more in-depth fundamentals such as Scalars, Hashes, and Arrays.
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