PERL1. PERL is a popular scripting language. PERL is so popular because: It runs on all platforms (UNIX, Windows, etc.) It easily parses text files and generates reports. It is easily to learn. Supports a large library of utilities to work from. Easily integrated into web-servers for CGI It is open-source Key point: v5 of PERL has the concept of "tainted" input that cannot be passed raw to the operating system without preprocessing. This is an amazingly useful feature that solves the majority of input validation problems in CGI scripts. Key point: A frequent misconfiguration is putting a PERL executable directly in the cgi-bin directory, allowing remote access of it. From Hacking-Lexicon 2. Practical Extraction and Report Language - An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (, author of patch(1) and rn(1)) and distributed over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many facilities reminiscent of sed(1) and shells and a comprehensive Unix system-call interface. From Linux Guide @FirstLinux 3. Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language. An interpreted scripting language, known among some as "Unix's Swiss Army Chainsaw". Perl is optimised for scanning arbitrary text files and system administration. It has built-in extended regular expression matching and replacement, a data-flow mechanism to improve security with setuid scripts and is extensible via modules that can interface to C libraries. From Debian 3.0r0 APT 4. Perl is a high-level programming language with roots in C, sed, awk and shell scripting. Perl is good at handling processes and files, and is especially good at handling text. Perl's hallmarks are practicality and efficiency. While it is used to do a lot of different things, Perl's most common applications (and what it excels at) are probably system administration utilities and web programming. A large proportion of the CGI scripts on the web are written in Perl. You need the perl package installed on your system so that your system can handle Perl scripts. You need perl-base to have a full perl. From Mandrake 9.0 RPM 5. Practical Extraction and Report Language From whatis |
