🐪 Perl: The Timeless Scripting Camel Still Marches On

🐪 Perl: The Timeless Scripting Camel Still Marches On

When it comes to scripting languages that have stood the test of time, Perl often gets overlooked — but it shouldn’t. Nicknamed “the duct tape of the Internet,” Perl was once the king of sysadmin scripts, text manipulation, and web CGI. In 2025, while it may no longer be at the top of every stack, it remains a valuable tool for scripting tasks, quick file parsing, and automation.

📜 What Is Perl?

Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language) was created by Larry Wall in 1987. It's known for being extremely flexible — some would say too flexible. It blends features from shell scripting, C, awk, sed, and more, giving it immense power for handling files, regular expressions, and dynamic programming.

🧠 Why Use Perl in 2025?

• ✅ It's pre-installed on almost all Unix/Linux systems
• ✅ Fast for prototyping and scripting
• ✅ Excellent regular expression support
• ✅ Great for quick automation, parsing logs, and ETL

🔍 Simple Perl Code Examples

1. Hello World

#!/usr/bin/perl  
print "Hello, World!\n";

2. Reading a File Line by Line

open(my $fh, '<', 'file.txt') or die "Cannot open file: $!";  
while (my $line = <$fh>) {  
  print $line;  
}  
close($fh);

3. Regular Expressions

my $text = "My email is [e-mail]";  
if ($text =~ /(\w+@\w+\.\w+)/) {  
  print "Found email: $1\n";  
}

4. Simple Web Scraper with LWP

use LWP::Simple;  
my $html = get('http://example.com');  
print $html if defined $html;

🔧 Installing Perl Modules

Perl uses CPAN — its version of a package manager. To install a module:

cpan install LWP::Simple

Or better yet, use cpanm:

cpanm JSON

🚨 When NOT to Use Perl

• ❌ Large web apps (look to Python, Ruby, or Node.js)
• ❌ Projects needing modern concurrency models
• ❌ When collaborating with teams unfamiliar with Perl syntax

✅ Final Thoughts

Perl isn’t dead. It’s just not trendy. But when you need something done fast — especially involving text — Perl can often do it in fewer lines and with less hassle than newer languages.

So if you’ve got log files to parse, a cron job to write, or a data file to transform, don’t forget the humble camel. 🐪

It may surprise you how fast it can gallop.