NAME
Perl::Tutorial::HelloWorld - Hello World for Perl
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
Running the program
Open a text editor, and type in the above program. Save it in a file named "hello". Then open a terminal window.
First ensure the file is given executable permissions:
chmod
u+x hello
Then you can run the program using either of the following:
./hello
perl hello
You should see it print "Hello, World!" to the console.
The first line
Every Perl program should start with a line similar to one of these:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#!/usr/bin/env perl
or on Windows:
#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
#!C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe
The first line is known as the "shebang line", and is used by UNIX-like systems to look up the path to the Perl interpreter.
Comments
Comments in Perl always start with a '#' character:
# This is a single-line comment.
# This comment extends over two lines
# to illustrate multi-line comments.
'hello'
;
# And here is an inline comment.
Anything to the right of a '#' will be ignored.
Statements
Statements always end with a semicolon in Perl:
'hello'
;
'This statement
extends
over two lines
because there is
no
semicolon on the first line.';
It is possible to have more than one statement on a single line, but generally this would not be very readable.
Strict and Warnings
These two statements turn on the 'strict' and 'warnings' pragmas:
These are strongly encouraged for all Perl programs - they tell the Perl interpreter to check for programming errors like undeclared variables.
Printing to standard output
To print some output to the terminal, you can use the 'print' function:
"Hello, World!\n"
;
In this case, the double-quoted string "Hello, World!\n" is being printed. You should see that the "\n" sequence does not appear on the console - it is used to mark the end of a line. Double-quoted strings can contain various other escape sequences.
SEE ALSO
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING
Copyright (C) 2011 Copperly Ltd.
This documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.