How To Execute Perl Script In Linux : All You Need To Know

As A Linux User, We Often Use Python And Bash Scripts. But When I Came Across This Question Of How To Execute Perl Script In Linux I Have Done Some Research And Found A Successful Method For Making, Running and executing Perl script. Here’s What I Found!

For Running Perl script in Linux, we just have to make or have Perl script with .pl extension. We can easily make the script through text editors like Vim, Nano, gedit, etc. Then we have to make our file executable by running the ” chmod +x example.pl ” Then We Can easily run the file by adding ./ before our file name like: “./example.pl” or through Perl command like “perl example.pl “

Let’s investigate this topic and understand a step-by-step method for executing Perl scripts in Linux. Let’s Get Started.

What Is Perl Script

Perl Script Is basically a file or program written in Perl programming language. Perl programming is known for its flexibility, text processing capabilities and use in system administration, automations and web development tasks. Perl Script Contains Instruction And Perl Interpreter run This instructions.

Step-by-step guide on creating and executing the Perl script

if you want to run something that means you also need something to run so in our case we need a Perl script. Making Perl script is as simple as creating Python, bash, and other scripts. In this post, we will create a simple “Hello World” saying perl file and will try to run it.

How to create a Perl script

For making a Perl script first we need to have a text editor where we can program our script for example vim, vs code, nano, gedit, etc. First, open your text editor and Program your script in our case for demo purposes I am making a simple script of Hello World.

Create a Perl script file:

You can directly create a new file at the terminal so firstly we have to open our terminal and then type this command

nano example.pl

So after successfully creating our Perl script file, we have to further program it by entering some coding in it in our case we are creating a simple “ Hello World “ telling script so to make this script we need to type this Code in our file.

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Hello, World!\n";

If you don’t know how to write code in Perl script then you can learn the Perl programming from this tutorial : Perl Programming Tutorials By Tutorials point

So after programming and entering some code in our file, we have to save it and close the file. In our case we are using Nano text editor so this is done by pressing Control + X then Y, and entering. On the keyboard.

Making Our Perl File Executable

After successfully creating our Perl file putting code in our file and saving it now it’s time to give a script executable permissions. To run Our file make sure you have given your file executable permissions. To make our file or script executable we need to type this command

chmod +x example.pl

Running  Perl script

Now we have successfully created our script for Hello World. also, we have given the executable permissions. now it’s time to run our script basically, there are two ways to run our Perl script on Linux

Direct Method

If this line: (“ #!/usr/bin/perl ”) is included in our script at the top then we can run the script directly by entering ./ before our file name This Line is known as shebang. So to run our script directly we have to type this command

./example.pl

Using the Perl interpreter

we can also use the Perl interpreter to execute our script even if the script is not marked as executable. So to use this method we have to run this command

perl example.pl

Now you can see we have successfully made our file & Made it executable and finally, We run the file.

Conclusion

So finally we saw how Easy it is to create an Perl file and making it executable. In this post we have successfully learned a method also we made files of a simple Hello World program also we made our file Executable and then finally we have learned two ways to  Run our file.  if you are facing any difficulties or any Errors then let me know in the comment section I will try to help you. if you found this post helpful then don’t forget to like it and rate it. And finally Thanks For Reading.

FAQs on how to execute Perl script in Linux