User since: Feb 01, 2011 at 15:37 UTC (15 years ago) Last here: Aug 06, 2025 at 21:56 UTC (2 hours ago) Experience: 52827 Level: Archbishop (23) Writeups: 4175 Location: The river bed User's localtime: Aug 07, 2025 at 00:41 BST Scratchpad: View Member of: QandAEditors For this user: Search nodes

Hippo's Law of Perl

If you are shelling out from Perl to use grep/sed/awk then you don't understand Perl.

Examples: OUTPUT Data to a table or horizontal bar chart, doughnut charts with gd:graph, system commands/shell and perl variables., sed in perl

Modules I should investigate

• Proc::Daemon (recommended by Arunbear)
• File::Map for slurping etc. although this has rather been superceded by Path::Tiny
• PDL for scientific computation (recommended by zentara).
• Memoize for boosting speed at expense of memory
• Module::ScanDeps for dependency trawling
• Syntax::Construct for feature enablement
• XML::Twig for parsing (widely recommended in these halls)
• Encoding::FixLatin for borked encodings
• Data::Validate::Domain does what you'd think
• rperl looks interesting too
• MCE for parallelisation
• Music::LilyPondUtil
• DBIx::Connector (recommended by davido)

Interesting Nodes

• Recommended Reading
• length() miscounting UTF8 characters?
• Re: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?
• grep with looped tests
• $class = ref($class) if ref($class) Redux
• eval, DESTROY, die and $@ - educational couple of hours
• How's your Perl?
• "Default" method
• RFC: Bi-directional multi-client non-blocking TCP server/client
• Net::SMTP::SSL connect failure
• Small examples of string eval
• Performance comparison Apache/FastCGI/Plack vs Apache/FCGI vs Plack standalone vs Apache/mod_perl (was "New version of Mod_perl")
• Data-driven Programming: fun with Perl, JSON, YAML, XML...
• Re: Simple UDP example anyone?
• Writing Solid CPAN Modules
• diff-servers.pl - Diff directory trees across machines
• Re^2: Secure Perl Coding Standards
• Re: Code cleanup; how best to deal with: defined(%hash) is deprecated at... (defined--)
• The 10**21 Problem (Part I)
• Things are not what they seem like.
• Coverage History
• Perl Development Tools
• developing in vim and tmux
• No Hard Tabs in Code (which is a lot less scorched than you might think)
• Re^3: Cron Jobs That Run For Too Long
• Re^5: Improve readability of Perl code. Naming reference variables.
• Re: perl one liner to replace matching string (updated x2) emulating -i
• WebPerlizator - automating WebPerl (by haukex) page creation
• Re^2: Perl Mapping (GIS) with OSM tiles
• Re: Creating a tarball [SOLUTION]
• Re: what are some of the most powerful, complex, one-liners?
• Termux for all your Perl-needs on Android
• Mini-Tutorial: Formats for Packing and Unpacking Numbers

See also the explanation of "missing" core modules in CentOS/RHEL.

How not to ask a question

There is plenty of excellent advice freely available for How (Not) To Ask A Question. Still we see shining examples of the art as selected here:

• $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR} problem
• Apache derby
• sell concert tickets
• phone paging with perl

Note that any question whose entire explanation of the problem is a variation of "It doesn't work" will be downvoted by me as being really rather useless.

Split personalities

The monastery welcomes those with difficult mental conditions including our clearly troubled brother finddata/perlanswers/test1234/gpssana/chellasama/gopikavi. We hope he makes a full and swift recovery and learns the value of an SSCCE.

Formatting

Think back to when you were 6 or 7 and you may have received a set of coloured pens/pencils/crayons/chalks as a gift. On first opening you try all of them as is natural. Over time you realise that your works of art benefit from slightly more restricted palettes such that nuance is introduced and composition skill allows the subject of the work to shine through. But some kids never get past the all-the-colours-all-the-time stage. Even today. Don't be like them. Choose nuance.

Dozers

There is an operating system so tortuously bad that I refuse point blank to have anything to do with it. Can you guess which one it is? Here is a new list (as at 2018) of just a very small selection of reasons to avoid this monstrosity.

• It doesn't have an SSH client
• The bundled spreadsheet can't even import CSV properly
• There is an invisible alias to some directories (Thanks to Discipulus for the pointer)
• Its filesystem is case-insensitive ... except for user-definable arbitrary areas where it isn't
• The pathnames are practically impossible to normalise
• Paths with spaces require quoting except when they don't
• ... more to follow

Shake it off!

♫ The trolls are gonna troll, troll, troll, troll, troll
♫ And your eyes are gonna roll, roll, roll, roll, roll
♫ But I'm just gonna vote, vote, vote, vote, vote
♫ Vote 'em down, vote 'em down!