Installing Perl

The first thing you will need to do is download Perl 5. You can do this easily, by going to www.perl.com There are two versions of Perl available and the differences are explained at www.perl.com. However, I use Gurusamy Sarathy's binary version of Perl for extra module support.

If you are using UNIX, you can download the .tar.gz (Note if you are using UNIX it is almost assuredly already installed and/or installable by your systems administrator. You probably should not do it yourself).

If you are using Windows or Macintosh, download the ZIP file. In any case, unzip utilities for all the platforms are available at www.shareware.com.

When you have downloaded the zipped file, you should uncompress it on your local hard drive. On Windows, I tend to extract it into a directory like c:\Perl\Perl5.004\. But the directory you use does not really matter much.

Note for Windows and UNIX users, you might want to add the Perl executable to your path, but it is not necessary for this tutorial. In case, you want to add it to your path, here is an example of the line I use in my autoexec.bat file. In UNIX you would typically define the PATH in .login, though it is better to install Perl in a standard directory that is already defined in your PATH such as "/usr/local/bin".

Okay, once Perl is installed, try running a simple Perl program to make sure everything is hunky dory. Here is the program I use:

    #!c:\Perl\Perl5.00402\bin\perl.exe
    print "hello world";

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