PERL(1)
💅 PERL(1) 💅 — the Perl Programmers Reference Guide
okay so bestie, welcome to PERL(1), aka the big one, aka the man page for the Perl 5 language interpreter, straight out of the Perl Programmers Reference Guide. it's giving legendary. it's giving ancient. it's giving literally runs half the internet. let's get into it 💖
✨ NAME ✨
perl — The Perl 5 language interpreter 🐪
🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸
like, here's the whole vibe of how you call it:
perl [ -sTtuUWX ] [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ]
[ -cw ] [ -d[t][:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ]
[ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal/hexadecimal] ]
[ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ] [ -f ]
[ -C [number/list] ] [ -S ] [ -x[dir] ]
[ -i[extension] ]
[ [-e|-E] 'command' ] [ -- ] [ programfile ] [ argument ]...okay so that's a LOT of little letters, and every single one of them matters. if you want the full tea on what they all do, run:
perldoc perlrunthat's your girl for every option and its lore. 💅
🫶 GETTING HELP 🫶
so the perldoc program is your ✨main character✨ access point to all the documentation that ships with Perl. and if you want even more docs, tutorials, and community support, it's all online at <https://www.perl.org/>. no cap. 🌈
if you're brand new to Perl, bestie, start here: run perldoc perlintro. it's the general intro for beginners, and it gives you the background you need to actually navigate the rest of Perl's extensive (read: absolutely enormous, iconic, intimidating) documentation. and run perldoc perldoc to learn all the other cute things you can do with perldoc. 🎀
and for ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into several sections. here's the whole map:
📚 Overview
perl— Perl overview (this section, hi, you're here 👋)perlintro— Perl introduction for beginnersperlrun— Perl execution and optionsperltoc— Perl documentation table of contents
🧚 Tutorials
perlreftut— Perl references short introductionperldsc— Perl data structures introperllol— Perl data structures: arrays of arraysperlrequick— Perl regular expressions quick startperlretut— Perl regular expressions tutorialperlootut— Perl OO tutorial for beginnersperlperf— Perl Performance and Optimization Techniquesperlstyle— Perl style guideperlcheat— Perl cheat sheetperltrap— Perl traps for the unwaryperldebtut— Perl debugging tutorialperlfaq— Perl frequently asked questionsperlfaq1— General Questions About Perlperlfaq2— Obtaining and Learning about Perlperlfaq3— Programming Toolsperlfaq4— Data Manipulationperlfaq5— Files and Formatsperlfaq6— Regexesperlfaq7— Perl Language Issuesperlfaq8— System Interactionperlfaq9— Networking
📖 Reference Manual
perlsyn— Perl syntaxperldata— Perl data structuresperlop— Perl operators and precedenceperlsub— Perl subroutinesperlfunc— Perl built-in functionsperlopentut— Perlopen()tutorialperlpacktut— Perlpack()andunpack()tutorial
perlpod— Perl plain old documentationperlpodspec— Perl plain old documentation format specificationperldocstyle— Perl style guide for core docsperlpodstyle— Perl POD style guideperldiag— Perl diagnostic messagesperldeprecation— Perl deprecationsperllexwarn— Perl warnings and their controlperldebug— Perl debuggingperlvar— Perl predefined variablesperlre— Perl regular expressions, the rest of the storyperlrebackslash— Perl regular expression backslash sequencesperlrecharclass— Perl regular expression character classesperlreref— Perl regular expressions quick referenceperlref— Perl references, the rest of the storyperlform— Perl formatsperlobj— Perl objectsperltie— Perl objects hidden behind simple variablesperldbmfilter— Perl DBM filters
perlipc— Perl interprocess communicationperlfork— Perlfork()informationperlnumber— Perl number semanticsperlthrtut— Perl threads tutorialperlport— Perl portability guideperllocale— Perl locale supportperluniintro— Perl Unicode introductionperlunicode— Perl Unicode supportperlunicook— Perl Unicode cookbookperlunifaq— Perl Unicode FAQperluniprops— Index of Unicode properties in Perlperlunitut— Perl Unicode tutorialperlebcdic— Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platformsperlsec— Perl securityperlsecpolicy— Perl security report handling policyperlmod— Perl modules: how they workperlmodlib— Perl modules: how to write and useperlmodstyle— Perl modules: how to write modules with styleperlmodinstall— Perl modules: how to install from CPANperlnewmod— Perl modules: preparing a new module for distributionperlpragma— Perl modules: writing a user pragmaperlutil— utilities packaged with the Perl distributionperlfilter— Perl source filtersperldtrace— Perl's support for DTraceperlglossary— Perl Glossary
🔧 Internals and C Language Interface
perlembed— Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ applicationperldebguts— Perl debugging guts and tipsperlxstut— Perl XS tutorialperlxs— Perl XS application programming interfaceperlxstypemap— Perl XS C/Perl type conversion toolsperlclib— Internal replacements for standard C library functionsperlguts— Perl internal functions for those doing extensionsperlcall— Perl calling conventions from Cperlmroapi— Perl method resolution plugin interfaceperlreapi— Perl regular expression plugin interfaceperlreguts— Perl regular expression engine internalsperlapi— Perl API listing (autogenerated)perlintern— Perl internal functions (autogenerated)perliol— C API for Perl's implementation of IO in Layersperlapio— Perl internal IO abstraction interfaceperlhack— Perl hackers guideperlsource— Guide to the Perl source treeperlinterp— Overview of the Perl interpreter source and how it worksperlhacktut— Walk through the creation of a simple C code patchperlhacktips— Tips for Perl core C code hackingperlpolicy— Perl development policiesperlgov— Perl Rules of Governanceperlgit— Using git with the Perl repository
📜 History
okay this part is the ✨receipts✨ section, aka every single version of Perl ever, documented for eternity:
perlhist— Perl history recordsperldelta— Perl changes since previous versionperl5341delta— Perl changes in version 5.34.1perl5340delta— Perl changes in version 5.34.0perl5321delta— Perl changes in version 5.32.1perl5320delta— Perl changes in version 5.32.0perl5303delta— Perl changes in version 5.30.3perl5302delta— Perl changes in version 5.30.2perl5301delta— Perl changes in version 5.30.1perl5300delta— Perl changes in version 5.30.0perl5283delta— Perl changes in version 5.28.3perl5282delta— Perl changes in version 5.28.2perl5281delta— Perl changes in version 5.28.1perl5280delta— Perl changes in version 5.28.0perl5263delta— Perl changes in version 5.26.3perl5262delta— Perl changes in version 5.26.2perl5261delta— Perl changes in version 5.26.1perl5260delta— Perl changes in version 5.26.0perl5244delta— Perl changes in version 5.24.4perl5243delta— Perl changes in version 5.24.3perl5242delta— Perl changes in version 5.24.2perl5241delta— Perl changes in version 5.24.1perl5240delta— Perl changes in version 5.24.0perl5224delta— Perl changes in version 5.22.4perl5223delta— Perl changes in version 5.22.3perl5222delta— Perl changes in version 5.22.2perl5221delta— Perl changes in version 5.22.1perl5220delta— Perl changes in version 5.22.0perl5203delta— Perl changes in version 5.20.3perl5202delta— Perl changes in version 5.20.2perl5201delta— Perl changes in version 5.20.1perl5200delta— Perl changes in version 5.20.0perl5184delta— Perl changes in version 5.18.4perl5182delta— Perl changes in version 5.18.2perl5181delta— Perl changes in version 5.18.1perl5180delta— Perl changes in version 5.18.0perl5163delta— Perl changes in version 5.16.3perl5162delta— Perl changes in version 5.16.2perl5161delta— Perl changes in version 5.16.1perl5160delta— Perl changes in version 5.16.0perl5144delta— Perl changes in version 5.14.4perl5143delta— Perl changes in version 5.14.3perl5142delta— Perl changes in version 5.14.2perl5141delta— Perl changes in version 5.14.1perl5140delta— Perl changes in version 5.14.0perl5125delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.5perl5124delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.4perl5123delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.3perl5122delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.2perl5121delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.1perl5120delta— Perl changes in version 5.12.0perl5101delta— Perl changes in version 5.10.1perl5100delta— Perl changes in version 5.10.0perl589delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.9perl588delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.8perl587delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.7perl586delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.6perl585delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.5perl584delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.4perl583delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.3perl582delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.2perl581delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.1perl58delta— Perl changes in version 5.8.0perl561delta— Perl changes in version 5.6.1perl56delta— Perl changes in version 5.6perl5005delta— Perl changes in version 5.005perl5004delta— Perl changes in version 5.004
like, that's sixty-something version docs. it's giving archival queen. don't skip them, they're history 💀
🎀 Miscellaneous
perlbook— Perl book informationperlcommunity— Perl community informationperldoc— Look up Perl documentation in Pod formatperlexperiment— A listing of experimental features in Perlperlartistic— Perl Artistic Licenseperlgpl— GNU General Public License
and that's the map, bestie. 🌟 more coming in part 2, don't go anywhere 👑
🌍 Language-Specific 🌸
These are the localized perldoc pages, for when English isn't the vibe:
perlcn— Perl for Simplified Chinese (in UTF-8)perljp— Perl for Japanese (in EUC-JP)perlko— Perl for Korean (in EUC-KR)perltw— Perl for Traditional Chinese (in Big5)
🖥️ Platform-Specific ✨
Every OS has its own little lore drop:
perlaix— Perl notes for AIXperlamiga— Perl notes for AmigaOSperlandroid— Perl notes for Androidperlbs2000— Perl notes for POSIX-BC BS2000perlcygwin— Perl notes for Cygwinperlfreebsd— Perl notes for FreeBSDperlhaiku— Perl notes for Haikuperlhpux— Perl notes for HP-UXperlhurd— Perl notes for Hurdperlirix— Perl notes for Irixperllinux— Perl notes for Linuxperlmacosx— Perl notes for Mac OS Xperlopenbsd— Perl notes for OpenBSDperlos2— Perl notes for OS/2perlos390— Perl notes for OS/390perlos400— Perl notes for OS/400perlplan9— Perl notes for Plan 9perlqnx— Perl notes for QNXperlriscos— Perl notes for RISC OSperlsolaris— Perl notes for Solarisperlsynology— Perl notes for Synologyperltru64— Perl notes for Tru64perlvms— Perl notes for VMSperlvos— Perl notes for Stratus VOSperlwin32— Perl notes for Windows
👻 Stubs for Deleted Documents 🪦
RIP to these, they're just placeholders now, no content bestie:
perlbootperlbotperlrepositoryperltodoperltoocperltoot
On Debian systems, you need to install the perl-doc package which contains the majority of the standard Perl documentation and the perldoc program.
There's also SO much extra documentation for Perl modules out there — both the ones distributed with Perl and third-party modules that are packaged or locally installed. The library is stacked, no cap. 📚
You should be able to view Perl's documentation with your man(1) program or perldoc(1).
Some documentation is not available as man pages, so if a cross-reference is not found by man, try it with perldoc. Perldoc can also take you directly to documentation for functions (with the -f switch). See perldoc --help (or perldoc perldoc or man perldoc) for other helpful options perldoc has to offer. It's giving personal tour guide fr. 🫶
In general, if something strange has gone wrong with your program and you're not sure where you should look for help, try making your code comply with use strict and use warnings. These will often point out exactly where the trouble is. They're literally the group chat that tells you what you did wrong. 😭
🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋
Perl officially stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, except when it doesn't. 💅
Perl was originally a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It quickly became a good language for many system management tasks. Over the years, Perl has grown into a general-purpose programming language. It's widely used for everything from quick "one-liners" to full-scale application development.
The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of sed, awk, and sh, making it familiar and easy to use for Unix users to whip up quick solutions to annoying problems. Its general-purpose programming facilities support procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming paradigms, making Perl a comfortable language for the long haul on major projects, whatever your bent.
Perl's roots in text processing haven't been forgotten over the years. It still boasts some of the most powerful regular expressions to be found anywhere, and its support for Unicode text is world-class. It handles all kinds of structured text, too, through an extensive collection of extensions. Those libraries, collected in the CPAN, provide ready-made solutions to an astounding array of problems. When they haven't set the standard themselves, they steal from the best -- just like Perl itself.
🌈 AVAILABILITY 🌈
Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually all Unix-like platforms. See "Supported Platforms" in perlport for a listing.
🌿 ENVIRONMENT 🌿
See "ENVIRONMENT" in perlrun.
👑 AUTHOR 👑
Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>, with the help of oodles of other folks.
If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of help to others who wish to advocate the use of Perl in their applications, or if you wish to simply express your gratitude to Larry and the Perl developers, please write to perl-thanks@perl.org .
🎀 FILES 🎀
"@INC" locations of perl libraries"@INC" above is a reference to the built-in variable of the same name; see perlvar for more information.
💖 SEE ALSO 💖
https://www.perl.org/— the Perl homepagehttps://www.perl.com/— Perl articleshttps://www.cpan.org/— the Comprehensive Perl Archivehttps://www.pm.org/— the Perl Mongers
🔥 DIAGNOSTICS 🔥
Using the use strict pragma ensures that all variables are properly declared and prevents other misuses of legacy Perl features. These are enabled by default within the scope of use v5.12 (or higher).
The use warnings pragma produces some lovely diagnostics. It is enabled by default when you say use v5.35 (or higher). One can also use the -w flag, but its use is normally discouraged, because it gets applied to all executed Perl code, including that not under your control.
Bestie, the -w flag is the messy ex you keep going back to — normally discouraged, okay? 🚩
See perldiag for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics. The use diagnostics pragma automatically turns Perl's normally terse warnings and errors into these longer forms.
Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the error, with an indication of the next token or token type that was to be examined. (In a script passed to Perl via -e switches, each -e is counted as one line.)
Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce error messages such as "Insecure dependency". See perlsec.
Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the use warnings pragma? 😭 (we did. we're saying it again. it's iconic.)
💀 BUGS 💀
The behavior implied by the use warnings pragma is not mandatory.
Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of various operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point output with sprintf().
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a particular stream, so does Perl. (This doesn't apply to sysread() and syswrite().)
While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary size limits (apart from memory size), there are still a few arbitrary limits: a given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters. Line numbers displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short integers, so they are limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being affected by wraparound).
You may submit your bug reports (be sure to include full configuration information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source tree, or by perl -V) to <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>.
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that. 🤫
⭐ NOTES ⭐
The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
That's the whole page bestie!! 🎀 This was perl version v5.36.0, dated 2026-09-29, and it lives at PERL(1). Go forth and write something unhinged and beautiful, ily 💜✨
📦 where this page comes from
- debian bookworm: perl-base 5.36.0-7+deb12u4 · GPL-1.0-or-later OR Artistic-1.0-Perl
- 💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms