PERL(1)
🌸 NAME 🌸
perl — The Perl 5 language interpreter 💖
Like, that's her. That's the whole thing. She runs Perl 5 and she's been doing it since before you were born, bestie.
✨ SYNOPSIS ✨
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 ]...Wanna know what every single one of those little letters does? Run this, no cap:
perldoc perlrun🫶 GETTING HELP 🫶
Okay so perldoc is your new bestie — it hands you all the documentation that ships with Perl. And if you want more docs, tutorials, and actual community support from real humans, they're online at <https://www.perl.org/>. 🌐✨
New to Perl? Do not just rawdog the manual, I'm begging you 😭. Start here:
perldoc perlintroThat's the general intro for beginners and it gives you the background you need so the rest of Perl's extensive documentation doesn't feel like a jumpscare. Once you're done there, run:
perldoc perldocand it'll show you all the other cute things perldoc can do for you. 🎀
And for ease of access (because the Perl manual is, respectfully, enormous), it's been split up into several sections. Here's the 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 syntax: declarations, statements, commentsperldata— Perl data structuresperlop— Perl expressions: operators, precedence, string literalsperlsub— Perl subroutinesperlfunc— Perl built-in functionsperlopentut— Perl open() tutorialperlpacktut— Perl pack() and unpack() 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
perlclass— Perl class syntaxperlipc— Perl interprocess communicationperlfork— Perl fork() 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— Interacting with 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 internalsperlclassguts— Internals of class syntaxperlapi— 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 ✨
the receipts, the lore, the whole timeline bestie 💖
perlhist— Perl history recordsperldelta— Perl changes since previous versionperl5400delta— Perl changes in version 5.40.0perl5382delta— Perl changes in version 5.38.2perl5381delta— Perl changes in version 5.38.1perl5380delta— Perl changes in version 5.38.0perl5363delta— Perl changes in version 5.36.3perl5362delta— Perl changes in version 5.36.2perl5361delta— Perl changes in version 5.36.1perl5360delta— Perl changes in version 5.36.0perl5343delta— Perl changes in version 5.34.3perl5342delta— Perl changes in version 5.34.2perl5341delta— 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
🌈 Miscellaneous 🌈
the little grab-bag of goodies, no cap 🫶
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
🌸 Language-Specific 🌸
Perl said "i speak your language too bestie" 💅
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 gets its own lil love letter, fr fr 💖
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 pages, they're ghosts now, but their names live on 👻
perlbootperlbotperlrepositoryperltodoperltoocperltoot
okay Debian besties, special note for you: you gotta install the perl-doc package, because that's the one holding the majority of the standard Perl documentation and the perldoc program itself. 💖
and there's SO much more docs out there — extensive additional documentation for Perl modules, both the ones that ship with Perl and third-party modules that are packaged or locally installed. ✨
you should be able to view all of Perl's documentation with your man(1) program or perldoc(1). 🫶
heads up tho: some documentation is not available as man pages. so if man can't find a cross-reference, try it with perldoc instead. perldoc can also take you straight to documentation for functions (with the -f switch). see perldoc --help (or perldoc perldoc or man perldoc) for the other helpful options perldoc has to offer. 💅
and like, in general? if something strange has gone wrong with your program and you're not sure where you should even look for help, try making your code comply with use strict and use warnings. these will often point out exactly where the trouble is. it's giving "the compiler is your therapist" 😭
✨ 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 homepage<https://www.perl.com/>— Perl articles<https://www.cpan.org/>— the Comprehensive Perl Archive<https://www.pm.org/>— the Perl Mongers
🩺 DIAGNOSTICS 🩺
Okay bestie, listen — the use strict pragma is literally the friend who makes sure every single variable is properly declared, and it also blocks all those other sneaky misuses of legacy Perl features. And guess what? It's enabled by default inside the scope of use v5.12 (or higher). So if you're on a modern version you already have it. Iconic behavior.
The use warnings pragma gives you the most lovely diagnostics — genuinely, they're a gift. It's enabled by default when you say use v5.35 (or higher). You could also use the -w flag, but ngl its use is normally discouraged, because it gets applied to all executed Perl code, including code that is not under your control. 🙈 Not the vibe.
See perldiag for explanations of all of Perl's diagnostics — that's your glossary, your study guide, your bestie. And the use diagnostics pragma will automatically turn Perl's normally terse warnings and errors into those longer, chattier forms. ✨
Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the error, along with an indication of the next token or token type that was to be examined. (Sneaky detail: 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 for the whole saga.
And did we mention that you should definitely consider using the use warnings pragma? Because you should. Consider it. Considered? Good. 🫶
🐛 BUGS 🐛
The behavior implied by the use warnings pragma is not mandatory. Yeah. We know. 😭
Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of various operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point output with sprintf(). It's giving "not my fault, blame the hardware." 💀
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a particular stream, then so does Perl. (This doesn't apply to sysread() and syswrite(), those two are exempt, slay.)
While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary size limits (apart from memory size, obviously, memory is memory), there are still a few arbitrary limits lurking:
- a given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters — so maybe chill on the descriptive names, queen
- line numbers displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short integers, so they're limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being affected by wraparound — yes, wraparound, the chaos)
You may submit your bug reports to:
<https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>Be sure to include full configuration information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source tree, or by perl -V. Full receipts, always. 🧾
And fun fact: 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. 😌 (It's a lot. It's so many. Good luck.)
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why — that's a whole other rabbit hole, iykyk. 🐪📚
And that's the whole page, bestie!! You made it to the very end, which is honestly main character energy. This was perl version v5.40.1, dated 2025-09-11 — go forth, write some wildly eclectic code, and remember: always use warnings. 💖✨🎀🦋💅
📦 where this page comes from
- ubuntu questing: libperl5.40 5.40.1-6build1
- 💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on : a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms