Perl::Tutorial::HelloWorld - Hello World for Perl

SYNOPSIS
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# The traditional first program.

# Strict and warnings are recommended.

use strict;
use warnings;

# Print a message.
print "Hello, World!\n";

DESCRIPTION
Running the program
Open a text editor, and type in the above program. Save it in a file named "hello". Then
open a terminal window.

First ensure the file is given executable permissions:

chmod u+x hello

Then you can run the program using either of the following:

./hello
perl hello

You should see it print "Hello, World!" to the console.

The first line

Every Perl program should start with a line similar to one of these:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#!/usr/bin/env perl

or on Windows:

#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
#!C:\strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe

The first line is known as the "shebang line", and is used by UNIX-like systems to look
up the path to the Perl interpreter.

Comments
Comments in Perl always start with a '#' character:

# This is a single-line comment.

# This comment extends over two lines

# to illustrate multi-line comments.

print 'hello'; # And here is an inline comment.

Anything to the right of a '#' will be ignored.

Statements
Statements always end with a semicolon in Perl:

print 'hello';

print 'This statement extends over two lines

because there is no semicolon on the first line.';

It is possible to have more than one statement on a single line, but generally this would
not be very readable.

Strict and Warnings

These two statements turn on the 'strict' and 'warnings' pragmas:

use strict;
use warnings;

These are strongly encouraged for all Perl programs - they tell the Perl interpreter to
check for programming errors like undeclared variables.

Printing to standard output

To print some output to the terminal, you can use the 'print' function:

print "Hello, World!\n";

In this case, the double-quoted string "Hello, World!\n" is being printed. You should see
that the "\n" sequence does not appear on the console - it is used to mark the end of a
line. Double-quoted strings can contain various other escape sequences.

SEE ALSO
Perl::Tutorial

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING

Copyright (C) 2011 Copperly Ltd.

This documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
same terms as Perl itself.