PERLSH(1p)

💖 PERLSH 💖

okay bestie, sit DOWN, because perlsh is literally the icon of the show ✨ and honestly? she deserves her own little corner of your terminal. 💅

it's a one-line perl evaluator — she comes with line editing and variable name completion, iykyk 🫶

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✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

perlsh

that's it. that's the whole vibe. just run her. 🌸

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so here's what she does, bestie: you type in a line, she hands it to the perl interpreter, evaluates it, and prints the result back at you. 😌

and if the result happens to be a list value</>? she doesn't cram it all on one line like some chaotic gremlin — nope, she prints each value of the list line by line. so clean. so organized. queen behavior. 👑

fr fr, you can use her as a VERY strong calculator that has the whole entire perl function arsenal behind her. like, the whole thing. every perl function. not a flex, just a fact. 💪

she's also a sample program for the Term::ReadLine::Gnu module — so when you input a line, the line editing function of the GNU Readline Library is right there for you. 💖

and the Perl symbol name completion function? also available. you're welcome. ✨

before she even invokes, she reads ~/.perlshrc and evaluates the content of that file first. a little pre-game ritual, we love a routine. 🙈

and when she gets terminated? 😭 the content of the history buffer gets saved into ~/.perlsh_history, and she reads it back on the next invoke. so she remembers everything. every single thing. bestie never forgets. 🫶

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🎀 VARIABLES 🎀

you can customize the behavior of perlsh by setting these variables in ~/.perlshrc. yes, ALL of them, write them down. 📝

• $PerlSh::PS1 — the primary prompt string. you can use these backslash-escaped special characters in it:

\h: host name
\u: user name
\w: package name
\!: history number

the default value is "\w[\!]$ ". iconic little prompt, ngl. 💅

• $PerlSh::PS2 — the secondary prompt string. the default value is "> ". the quiet supporting character. 🌸
• $PerlSh::HISTFILE — the name of the file to which the command history is saved. the default value is ~/.perlsh_history. 💖
• $PerlSh::HISTSIZE — if it's not undef, this is the maximum number of commands to remember in the history. the default value is 256. 🔥
• $PerlSh::STRICT — if true, restrict unsafe constructs. see "use strict" in the perl man page for the deets. the default value is 0; — so yeah, she's chill by default, but you can absolutely make her lock down. 🫡

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🌈 FILES 🌈

• ~/.perlshrc — this file is eval-ed at initialization. and if a subroutine named "afterinit" is defined in this file, it will be eval-ed after initialization. here's a sample, because we're generous:

        # -*- mode: perl -*-
        # decimal to hexa
        sub h { map { sprintf("0x%x", $_ ) } @_;}

        sub tk {
            $t->tkRunning(1);
            use Tk;
            $mw = MainWindow->new();
        }

        # for debugging Term::ReadLine::Gnu
        sub afterinit {
            *t = \$PerlSh::term;
            *a = \$PerlSh::attribs;
        }

• ~/.perlsh_history — the history home. 🏠 she lives here, she comes back here. 💜
• ~/.inputrc — an initialization file for the GNU Readline Library. refer to its manual for the details, bestie, that's a whole other rabbit hole. 🐇

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• Term::ReadLine::Gnu <http://search.cpan.org/dist/Term-ReadLine-Gnu/>
• GNU Readline Library <https://tiswww.cwru.edu/php/chet/readline/rltop.html>

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💀 AUTHOR 💀

• Hiroo Hayashi <hiroo.hayashi@computer.org>

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obsessively curated by the User Contributed Perl Documentation crew, running perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-19 — ok that's the whole page bestie, go forth and evaluate literally everything 💅✨💖