PARD: Perl
Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbritrary text
files, extracting 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, complete)
rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It 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.
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. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs through a
dataflow tracing mechanism which prevents many stupid security holes.
This perl 5 library uses objects to create Web fill-out forms on the fly and
to parse their contents. It provides a simple interface for parsing and
interpreting query strings passed to CGI scripts. However, it also offers a
rich set of functions for creating fill-out forms. Instead of remembering
the syntax for HTML form elements, you just make a series of perl function
calls. An important fringe benefit of this is that the value of the previous
query is used to initialize the form, so that the state of the form is
preserved from invocation to invocation.
Date::Manip allows you to easily parse and manipulate dates (several
different foreign languages are supported and more can be added easily,
international date formats are also supported). A date calculator is also
included to tell the time elapsed between two dates, or to find a date a
certain amount of time from a given date. Calculations can also be done
using a special business mode where weekends and holidays are ignored.
This module, ReadKey, provides ioctl control for terminals and Win32
consoles so the input modes can be changed (thus allowing reads of a single
character at a time), and also provides non-blocking reads of stdin, as well
as several other terminal related features, including retrieval/modification
of the screen size, and retrieval/modification of the control characters.
Libwww-perl is a collection of Perl modules which provides a simple and
consistent programming interface (API) to the World-Wide Web. The main focus
of the library is to provide classes and functions that allow you to write
WWW clients, thus libwww-perl said to be a WWW client library. The library
also contain modules that are of more general use and even classes that
helps you implement simple HTTP servers.
Net::SSLeay.pm is a perl module that allows you to call Secure Sockets Layer
(SSL) functions of the SSLeay library directly from your perl scripts. Its
useful if you want to program robots that access secure web servers or if
you want to build your own applications over SSL encrypted tunnels. If you
just want to view web pages on https servers, you do not need this - your
web browser already know to do that.
© 1999 by Stefan Hornburg
<racke@linuxia.de>
Last modified 03. June 1999
