Miscellaneous Features of Perl

There are a number of miscellaneous features that Perl has that have not fallen into the previous categories which i will touch on now.

Require Function

This function provides away to break your program into separate files and create libraries of functions. When the Perl interpreter sees the require statement it searchs the directories specified by the built-in array variable @INC for the file specified. The file is executed if found, if not found then the program aborts and displays a error message.

Require Function

require ("myprog.pl");          ## executes the myprog.pl program

@proglist = ("test_prog1.pl", "test_prog2.pl", "test_prog3.pl");
require ($proglist[0]);
require ($proglist[1]);
require ($proglist[2]);

require;                        ## the value of $_ is the file name whose contents are to be executed

Most of the time however you will use the require function to pull in subroutines from Perl programs that can be used. You can create specific libraries for Databases, Network, Security.

Using subroutines from other Perl programs ## Main Program (test.pl)
require ("function.pl");                ## execute the function.pl program

toString();                             ## The toString subroutine obtained from function.pl

## Function program (functions.pl)
print "Library: functions";

sub toString {
   print "A subroutine in the function library ";
}

The last thing require can do is to make sure that you use a specific version of Perl, maybe the program contains syntax that can only be run in version 5.6.

Specify a Perl version

require 5.001;                          ## your program requires version 5.001 or above to run

Note: if you run this on a older version of perl it will terminate with an error

$#<array> Variable

For each variable defined in your program, a variable named $#<array>, in which array is the name of your array is also defined. This variable contains the subscript of the last element of the array.

$#array example my @myarray = qw( 1 2 3 4);

$last_subscript = $#myarray;

print "Last element in myarray is: " . $last_subscript . "\n";

Note: $[ can affect $#array as $[ determines the first subscript number (by default a 0) - see perl cheat sheet for more information on $[

You commonly see this variable being used in the $#ARGV to determine the number of variables passed to a perl program.

Commandline arguments if ( $#ARGV == -1 ) {                                 ## -1 means no elements
   die ("No file parameters have been passed");
}           

You can create very large arrays using the $#<array>, or shorten an array

Create very large array

$#veryBigArray = 9999;                                ## create an array with 10,000 elements

Note: if it cannot create the array the program terminates

Shorten an array $#varyBigArray = 5000;                                ## destroy elements from 5001 to 10,000

Alternative String Delimiters

You can use single or double quotes for strings, double quotes will search and replace variable names. There are a number of other delimiters choices you can use

Alternative String Delimiters $test_string = "World";

$string1 = 'Hello $test_string';
$string2 = "Hello $test_string";

$string3 = q'Hello $test_string';               ## same as using single quotes
$string4 = qq/Hello $test_string/;              ## same as using double quotes

print $string1 . "\n";
print $string2 . "\n";
print $string3 . "\n";
print $string4 . "\n";

Break string into words @myarray = qw(hello there it's a nice day);

Defining Strings Using <<

You can use << to indicate the beginning of a string, this is also known as a here document.

<< example

$longstring = <<END;                             ## defining a terminatation string (END) - note the semicolon
The first part a a very very very long string
The second part a a very very very long string
The third part a a very very very long string
END                                               ## used to terminate the here doc

You can also use to automatic input information in other programs such as FTP, Telnet

FTP example usr/bin/ftp<<END;                      ## END is the terminating string
open ftp.datadisk.co.uk                ## FTP commands
user pvalle
password
cd public/upload
put $file
bye
END                                    ## here doc finish

Special Internal Values

You can use three special values in your program

Example print "Line number is: " . __LINE__ . "\n";
print "Program is: " . __FILE__ . "\n\n";

## Use data in the file
while (<DATA>) {
   print;
}

__END__                       ## you could have used __DATA__ means the same
hello
first data line
2nd data line

Back Quotes to Invoke System commands

You can run system commands using back quotes, the output of the command will be treated as string.

Example

$myname = `whoami`;               ## Unix system command
            
$ip_info = `ipconfig`;            ## Windows system command
print "Return code: " . $?;       ## The return code of the execute system command

print $myname ;
print $ip_info;

 

Note: the return code of the system command is store in system variable $?