Tips and tricks for programming in perl

Please send a mail to Ulrich Germann if you would like contribute something to this page.

Where *IS* perl?
Actually this is not a commonly aksed question. I've been asked it only once so far. But it's a likely question.
=> At least on SPARC systems, the latest version of perl is invoced by

/local/perl5.004/bin/perl
Who can help me with perl?
If(and only if) you are ISD staff, one of our perl experts. Keep in mind, however, that they are no perl tutors. They are busy researchers. So try to get help from books (e.g. Learning Perl or Programming Perl, both published by O'Reilly) or online resources first, and if you feel that you're still stuck with your problem, ask concise questions, describing exactly what you want to accomplish and where the problem is.

Extending the @INC path on the fly
If you cannot or do not want to change the @INC path for perl permanently, the following line in your code will add the directory of the respective perl script to the @INC path:
BEGIN { push @INC, substr($0, 0, rindex($0, "\/")); }
As long as packages reside within the same directory as the scripts calling them, they will be found.

Here's a list of modules developed at ISD that might be of general interest.

LispLists.pm
This module currently provides two subroutines associated with interacting and dealing with lisp style lists:

QUESTION: I try to print runtime information to STDOUT in order to keep track of the process, but it shows up only with significant delays unless I print an EOL character (\n).
ANSWER: => Print to STDERR, and your info will show up right away. The drawback is that more won't work then to page the output.