Programming With Perl
So recently I had to figure out a way to quickly solve a problem involving 6GB of tab delimited text files. I have Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems at my disposal, and therefore have a plethora of “almost” solutions. I spent some time playing with the OS X/Linux tools awk and sed, but couldn’t get them to do exactly what I wanted. Surprisingly, I’ve never used Perl for any real length of time, but I started looking into how I could use Perl to quickly process text files at the command line. It seems like Perl was basically designed with text processing in mind. After a bit of time hacking away at my first Perl script I realized that Perl is awesome! It is one of the most flexible programming languages I’ve ever used. Perl is available by default on just about every Unix/Linux/OS X system and you can do just about anything with it (including GUI applications). You can also find ton of examples, modules, and other source code over at CPAN.org. I’ve decided to share an example of how to process tab delimited text files under the new Perl Scripts section of the website. As I play around more and more with Perl I’ll be posting new scripts and projects.
Additional Perl Resources