CGI City is providing a free Online Perl Reference service. Use this facility as a general reference to all the Perl functions. Just type in a Perl function or command then press the button.

ABOUT PERL

Perl is perhaps the most widely used language for World Wide Web applications. Its core functionality was originally intended for parsing text-based data and generating results based on these data. It is now more commonly used for WWW applications such as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming and processing of data passed through web forms. While it may not compare directly with the new breeds of programming languages and object-oriented development tools, its use is never under-rated. This is perhaps because it has by far the easiest implementation.

Perl is distributed as source code rather than as binary executables. This makes it easier to customize each installation to the user's own preferences and requirements. Perl was originally designed for the Unix operating system, but ports to various operating systems are also available. Note also that there have been cases reported where problems were encountered in these non-native ports. Example of these cases include functions and commands behaving differently, and some even not working at all. It is reommended that Perl documentation be consulted to anticipate any deployment issues on the non-natve systems.