Chapter 1 What is Perl

Perl is an acronym for "Practical Extraction and Report Language"

It is an interpreted language that is optimized for string manipulation, I/O, and system tasks. It has builtins for almost everything that's in section 2 of the UNIX manuals, which makes it very popular with system administrators. It incorporates syntax elements from the Bourne shell, csh, awk, sed, grep, and C.