Programming in Perl Technologies Basic/Intermediate (UNIX and Windows Platforms)

Course Number:  669-TP
Recommended Duration:  3 days

Course Overview
This course teaches both the programming interface and the techniques that can be used to write procedures in Perl (Practical Extraction and Report Language).  Perl is available for all UNIX platforms and for all Windows variants.

Objectives
Each student will be able to use Perl techniques and commands to write scripts to perform various user and administrative tasks.

Prerequisites
For UNIX users, completion of the Fundamentals of Solaris/AIX/HP-UX/Linux course is assumed.  A knowledge of awk is useful but not mandatory.

For Windows users, basic knowledge of a text editor such as Wordpad or Notepad is useful.

Topics

• Overview of Perl

  • Purpose of the language

  • History of the development of Perl

  • Control capabilities: files, processes, and network

• Writing Perl Scripts

  • Getting Started

  • Types of variables: user-defined, lists, scalars, associative arrays (hashes), system specials, and global specials

  • Formatting a report

  • Accessing records by key(s)

  • Operators: precedence, arithmetic, increment/decrement, pattern matching, relational, conditional, assignment,

  • Subroutines

  • Passing arguments

  • Using as functions

• Special Uses of Perl

  • System administration

  • Filename manipulation

  • Text manipulation

  • Process control

• Miscellaneous Perl Features

  • Efficiency considerations: time, space, portability, programmer, and maintenance

  • Translating awk and sed scripts to Perl

  • Common errors