Perl

June 29, 2026 · View on GitHub

Perl is a legend of programming languages.

Easily one of the fastest easiest most powerful imperative scripting languages, and legendary for text processing and regular expressions.

It's the language of elite unix sysadmins, and much of unix tooling is built on it, including Git.

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions
Core Reading
Perl in-place fast file editing (like sed but more powerful)
DevOps Perl tools
Shell scripts with Perl
Nagios Plugins in Perl
CPAN / CPANM
Libraries
- General
- Web
- Databases
- Testing & Logging
- Other
- More
My Perl Library with Unit Tests
Meme
- Ugly Code

PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expressions

PCRE has the gold standard of regex for decades and is the standard by which other languages are judged.

It's regex engine is faster and more advanced than Python's. You can see many examples where both are used in the following GitHub repos:

Bash / Grep style BRE / ERE - basic regular expressions / extended regular expressions are the poor man's version, and awkward for serious usage. Still, you can see many examples of Bash / Grep BRE/ERE format regex usage in:

DevOps-Bash-tools

Even if you don't know Perl programming you should at least in-place editing of files as it's even more powerful than sed.

Core Reading

Programming Perl

Perl in-place fast file editing (like sed but more powerful)

perl -pi -e 's/OLD/NEW/g' *.txt *.yaml ...

You can see most of these used throughout my GitHub repos, eg:

General

:package: Getopt::Long - Popular command line arg parser
:package: Data::Dumper - Print any Perl structure for easy debugging
:package: DateTime - Date and time object for Perl
:package: Time::HiRes - High resolution alarm, sleep, gettimeofday, interval timers
:package: Time::Local - Efficiently compute time from local and GMT time
:package: Math::Round - round numbers
:package: Digest::MD5 - MD5 hash algorithm
:package: Digest::SHA - SHA hash algorithm
:package: Template Toolkit - Template processing system
:package: Term::ANSIColor on CPAN - ANSI colors for terminal
:package: Net::DNS - popular DNS querying library
:package: Net::SSH::Expect - Execute remote SSH commands using Expect
:package: MIME::Base64 - Encode / decode base64 strings
:package: Email::Sender - Email sending library
:package: Sys::Hostname - Try every conceivable way to get hostname

Web

:package: LWP::Simple - easy to use HTTP(S) request library
:package: LWP::UserAgent - HTTP(S) request library with more power
:package: Net::HTTP - Low-level HTTP client
:package: JSON::XS - Fast JSON serializing
:package: XML::Simple - Simple XML parsing
:package: XML::Parser - XML parsing using Expat
:package: URI - Uniform Resource Identifier handling

Databases

:package: DBI - Database interface for Perl to access RDBMS databases
:package: DBD::mysql - MySQL database driver for DBI
:package: DBD::Pg - PostgreSQL database driver for DBI
:package: DBD::Oracle - Oracle database driver for DBI
:package: DBIx::Class - Extensible ORM for Perl

Testing & Logging

:package: Data-Faker - generates fake data for testing
:package: Log::Log4perl - Logging framework
:package: Test::Simple - Basic utilities for writing tests
:package: Test::More - More comprehensive utility functions for writing tests
:package: Test::Harness - Run Perl standard test scripts

Other

:package: File::Slurp - Simple file reading/writing
:package: Path::Tiny - Simple file path manipulation
:package: Try::Tiny - Minimal try/catch framework

Other popular libraries:

:package: Mojolicious - Real-time web framework
:package: Catalyst - MVC web framework
:package: Plack - PSGI compliant web application framework
:package: Dancer2 - Lightweight web framework
:package: Moose - Modern object system for Perl
:package: Mouse - Lightweight object system for Perl
:package: Crypt::OpenSSL::RSA - RSA encryption
:package: AnyEvent - Framework for asynchronous programming
:package: Parallel::ForkManager - Simple parallel processing manager
:package: SOAP::Lite - Client and server SOAP library