I am just begining to start working with perl. I plan to use it along with my software design. I hope to spice up my site with it along with a little flash 5 eventually. I have herd many good things about it also. If anyone out there uses it frequently, please, reply to this and let me what are some common uses for it? Also if anyone knows a good server that allows you to use perl, please lemme know. Most importantly, if anyone know knows how to allow a perl script run on your computer, PLEASE, LET ME KNOW HOW!!! that's mainly it. Thanks all for reading this.

PSyKoSiS
http://onlythesly.com

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Perl is capable of doing almost anything you imagine. There has been everything from basic counters, message boards, and guestbooks, to an entire remote-server administration control panel written in Perl. Most webhosts allow access to Perl on their servers, as it is fairly easy to set up.

Also, you asked about a way to run perl scripts on your own machine. There is such a way - through CygWin. CygWin is a method of compiling and running UNIX-based programs on a windows machine, although its not for newbies and requires quite a bit of UNIX experience. You can check it out at http://www.cygwin.com/ .

And once you get in to Perl, feel free to come ask me with any code problems or questions. Happy coding!

There's also ActivePerl for Windows platforms, which is probably what you'll want to begin with (and keep going with, it's a very nice product). It installs just as easily as any other Windows programs, and saves you any difficulties if you're not familiar with Unix-like installs. Some scripts written specifically for Unix will not work under windows anyway, but if your main concern is writing you're own stuff, ActivePerl is the way to go.

It's available from http://www.activeperl.com.

If you're mainly interested in CGI scripting, you'll need a web server as well. You can use IIS, but it may give you nightmares. Apache is available on Windows, and for development work is the way to go I think - http://www.apache.org.

And, as bombino said, Perl is capable of many things, and will run on nearly any server under the sun (that's the burning gas ball, not Sun Microsystems :D). You shouldn't have any problems in that respect.

Thanks for the info you guys. I been reading up on basics of perl and trying stuff out but it was a real hassel to have to upload my scripts everytime i made a change to see if the worked. I am downloading Active perl as i type to give it a trial run i guess. Thanks again






PSyKoSiS
http://onlythesly.com - needs a new design soon, lol

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Hey,

I found a great book for when I was just starting to learn PERL. It's called "PERL" and the ISBN code is 0-7645-3478-5 it sells for about $24.99 US and covers the basics very well but it's really good not so good for very advanced functions. But again a great beginners book. Website is www.idgbooks.com

A great program that works with ActivePerl is DzSoft PERL Editor. It's like other compliers but has a nice control panel, and picks out all your little mistakes and most of all runs all your scripts on a Windows platform. I think the website is www.dzsoft.com

Also a good resource for commands and PERL functions is http://www.xav.com/perl/ It's the ActivePerl Docs and provides all the commands available in the PERL distribution and on what platforms they will run on, how to use them, etc...

If you need anymore help feel free to drop me a message.

I downloaded ActivePerl and installed it. But when i tried opening perl documents with internet explorer, nothing would happen, the browser would not open. With netscape 6.1, it just views the perl file as a text file. This is probably more or less something with my browsers, but if anyone has any idea why it happen,s let me know!!!!!

Oh, and on the subject of books, I have one called, Perl and CGI for the world wide web. It's a visual quick start book. It covers the basics, but books by these people usually give you more example scripts then actually teaching you.
I'll check out that one book though, thanks.




PSyKoSiS
http://ww.onlythesly.com

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Originally posted by PSyKoSiS
I downloaded ActivePerl and installed it. But when i tried opening perl documents with internet explorer, nothing would happen, the browser would not open. With netscape 6.1, it just views the perl file as a text file. This is probably more or less something with my browsers, but if anyone has any idea why it happen,s let me know!!!!!



You need to setup a webserver on your machine. A light weight server good for getting started on windows is at www.xitami.com. After you install the server and get it running put your perl script in an area the server uses for webpages and type http://127.0.0.1/myscript.pl or the equivalent path to where you put the script.

Jeff

When you have PERL installed you can just go to the MS-DOS prompt and then go to where PERL is installed and type

perl myscript.pl

This methods works however it doesn't let you pass can variables to the script if that's what you need. So in that case again I can only refer you to Dzsoft which lets you specifically accomplish this.

Originally posted by PERL SCRIPTOR
When you have PERL installed you can just go to the MS-DOS prompt and then go to where PERL is installed and type

perl myscript.pl

This methods works however it doesn't let you pass can variables to the script if that's what you need. So in that case again I can only refer you to Dzsoft which lets you specifically accomplish this.

If you use the CGI module that comes with the Activestate distribution, it will let you pass parameters to the script.

Jeff

Awesome. Thanks. :)

Thanks for the help on all this perl stuff. I already have xitami installed, so thanks on for the advice though. I think my last questions will be, do i have to have the perl installed somewhere special and what would the path be to locate the perl?

Thanks

PSyKoSiS

On windows perl is usually located in c:\perl. The activestate setup should have added perl to the path so you shouldn't have to do anything special to run it other than make sure it's extension is .pl so windows knows it's a perl script.

Jeff