Basic Perl questions from Perl beginner now using Leopard

Question

Question: I used to dabble in Perl programming (beginner!!) and want to continue my dabbling with my new iMac running Leopard.
Which Perl do I need to install?
Where do I get it from?
What tricks / concerns are there in the installation?
What's the best source of information (books?, internet?) for learning about using/programming Perl on Leopard?
Any other advice that you believe would be helpful would be appreciated.
Many thanks!! D

Answer 1

I used to use MacPerl as well, it's even better now that Perl is pre-installed and native.
The two thing that took me the most time to figure out are:
Line endings. All my old scripts had carriage return - line feed as end of line delimiters.
On linux they have to be line feed '\x0A'. You do that by setting it in your text editor. I use BBEdit or Text Mate to write perl, although I'm pretty sure that using TextEdit will work, and will have line feed line endings.
Setting the script's executable bit. A script file needs to have a bit set in the linux filesystem to tell linux it's executable. You do that by opening the terminal and typing chmod +x then drag your script file into the terminal and pressing return.
That's detailed here:
http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/mac/2003/11/07/scripting_osx.html
Also there are 2 main ways to run your script.
One is by opening Terminal and +typing perl+ then dragging your script into the terminal window and hitting return. if you want to do it this way the very first line in your perl script needs to look like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
The other way (which is only slightly easier) is by dragging your script into the terminal window and hitting enter, no typing perl every time. To do this the very first line of your perl script needs to be:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
Another huge tip is if you are in the Terminal window hitting command-up arrow will show you the last command you typed in, so you can hit enter and re-run it.
Other than that stuff I can't remember any differences between regular linux perl and Leopard perl. I still refer to the Camel book I bought 15 or so years ago.
So type into a text editor:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Hello World\n";
Then save the file as Hello.pl
open terminal and type *chmod +x*
drag Hello.pl into the terminal and press return
Type perl into the Terminal
drag Hello.pl into the terminal and press return.
and it should print.