What is Perl? A Guide for Web Hosting Users
Perl is a high-level, interpreted programming language that has been a cornerstone of web development since the early days of the internet. Originally created in 1987 by Larry Wall, its name stands for "Practical Extraction and Report Language." For web hosting customers, understanding Perl is valuable because many legacy systems, scripts, and powerful web applications still rely on it.
In the context of web hosting, Perl is primarily used for server-side scripting. This means the code runs on your web server, not in the user's browser. It excels at:
- Text processing and manipulation, making it ideal for parsing logs or form data.
- CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripting, a standard method for running scripts on a web server.
- Automating system administration tasks and file management.
If your hosting plan supports it (most do), you can run Perl scripts, often with a .pl or .cgi file extension. A classic "Hello World" CGI script in Perl might look like this in a file named hello.cgi:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "<html><body><h1>Hello, World!</h1></body></html>";While newer languages like Python, PHP, and Node.js are more common for modern web apps, Perl remains a powerful, flexible tool in a developer's toolkit. Its motto, "There's more than one way to do it" (TMTOWTDI), reflects its design philosophy of versatility. For hosting users, its main relevance today is maintaining and understanding existing scripts, though it's still perfectly capable for new projects, especially those involving complex text handling.
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