Perl 5 Interactive Course
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): JON ORWANT
ISBN: 1571690646
Publication Date: 08/30/96

Introduction

Preface

About the Author

CHAPTER 1—MEET PERL: THE BASICS

Session 1—The Look and Feel of Perl

Running a Perl Program

Command-Line Flags

Is Perl Compiled or Interpreted?

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Scalars

Double Quotes and Single Quotes

Functions

The chomp() and chop() Functions

Operators

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—The if Statement and Expressions

Expressions

Backslashed Characters

if...else Statements

Assignment Operators

Exponentiation

Precedence

Autoincrement and Autodecrement

The ?: Operator

The ! Operator

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Introduction to Loops

Beware Infinite Loops!

The % Operator

The int() Function

Rounding Numbers

Integer Arithmetic

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Arrays

The foreach Loop

Array Indexing

A Few Words About Initial Characters

Out of Bounds!

The Last Index of an Array

The $[ Special Variable

Negative Array Indexes

Adding and Removing Array Elements

push() and pop()

unshift() and shift()

splice()

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced Loops

The for Loop

Loop Control: next, last, andredo

Ssssshhhhh!

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—The Default Variable $_

@ARGV

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Contexts

The scalar() Function

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Difficult

CHAPTER 2—PATTERN MATCHING: REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

Session 1—Regular Expressions

Making Substitutions

Alternatives

The -n and -p Command-Line Flags

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Metacharacters And Special Characters

Kleene Plus: +

Kleene Star: *

Curly Braces

Question Marks

The . Special Character

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Matching

Parentheses

QUIZ 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Translations

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Pattern Anchors and Some More Special Variables

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced regexes I and grep()

Ranges

grep()

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—map() and Advanced Regexes II

map()

Greediness

Uncluttering regexes

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Advanced regexes III

Regexp Extensions

study()

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Moderate

Medium

Hard

CHAPTER 3—THE OUTSIDE WORLD: FILES AND FILEHANDLES

Session 1—Introduction to I/O

Filehandles

Standard Filehandles

Reading from a File

Exiting a Program

Logical Operators

The $! Special Variable

Writing to a File

In-Place Editing

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Reading and Writing

Moving Around in a File

Shortening Files

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—External Programs and Pipes

Backquotes

system()

Executing Another Perl Program

Piping Data to and from a Program

Pipe Errors

Deleting Files

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Interacting with UNIX

Links

File Locking

UNIX Permissions

utime()

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Using Internet Applications

Generating E-Mail from Your Perl Programs

Filtering Incoming E-Mail

Using an Internet Service

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Inspecting Files

_, stat(), and file tests

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—File Bits and Bytes

Testing for “End of File”

Reading Bytes Instead of Lines

Buffering

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Accessing Directories

Accessing Directories

Making (and Unmaking) Directories

Changing Directories

Globbing

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 4—DIVIDE AND CONQUER: SUBROUTINES

Session 1—Introduction To Subroutines

Invoking Subroutines

Subroutine Output

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Argument Passing And Some Math

A Bit of Math: sqrt() and abs()

Exponential Notation

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Recursion And More Math

Recursion

sin(), cos(), and atan2()

exp() and log()

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Scoping

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Blocks

Labels

goto

do()…until()

Continue Blocks

reset()

??

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Organizing Arrays And Autoloading Functions

Sorting

The <=> and cmp Operators

Joining Arrays and Splitting Strings

Array Interpolation

Reversing Variables

Autoloading

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Section 7—Arrays And Subroutines

Passing Multiple Arrays into a Subroutine

Passing References

Passing Globs

Modifying Subroutine Arguments

Passing a Filehandle into a Subroutine

wantarray()

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Bits and Bases

chr(), ord(), oct(), and hex()

Bitwise Operators

vec()

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 5—MINCING WORDS: HASHES

Session 1—What’s a Hash?

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Manipulating Keys and Values

Retrieving Keys or Values

Retrieving Keys and Values

Deleting Key-Value Pairs

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Randomness and Time

Choosing a Random Number

Time

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—%Env and Sleeping

Sleeping

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Existence

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Data Structures

User-Defined Data Types

Anonymous Variables

Multielement Keys

The Perl Data Structures Cookbook

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Hash Leftovers

Hash Storage Efficiency

Hashes as Subroutine Arguments

Symbol Tables

Sorting a Hash

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Quoting Operators and Barewords

q, qq, and qx

qw()

quotemeta()

Barewords

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

Review

CHAPTER 6—LOOKS ARE EVERYTHING: FORMATS

Session 1—Introduction To Formats

Declaring Formats

Naming Formats

Formatting Without Formats

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Picture Fields

Aligning Variables

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Pages

Headers

Pagination

Lines on a Page and Footers

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Formatted Strings

Printing a Formatted String

Creating a Formatted String

Record Separators

The Input Record Separator

The Output Record Separator

Field and List Separators

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Here Strings And Special Literals

Here Strings

Special Literals

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced Formats

Multiline Picture Fields

Accessing Your Formatted Data Without Printing

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Generating PostScript

The PostScript Page Description Language

PostScript Headers and Footers

Drawing Lines

Drawing Text

Circles, Squares, and Fills

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Binary Data

Binary Data

TIFF

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 7—hOOPla: OBJECT-ORIENTED PROGRAMMING

Session 1—OOP and Packages

Object-Oriented Programming

Encapsulation

Inheritance

Polymorphism

Packages

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—References

Creating and Accessing References

A Word About Syntax

The ref() Function

Copying References vs. Copying Values

Symbolic References vs. Hard References

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Anonymous Variables and Objects

Anonymous Variables (and Anonymous Functions)

Omitting ->

Anonymous Subroutines and Closures

Creating Objects

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Methods

Static vs. Virtual Methods

Passing Arguments to Methods

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Inheritance

Choosing a Base Class

Inheritance: Where Does It End?

Multiple Inheritance

Inheriting Variables

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced OOP Features

Subpackages

Access to Overridden Methods

Destructors

Reblessing Objects

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—OOP Design Methods

A Containing Relationship

Calling the Right Method

Class Variables

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Overloading

%OVERLOAD

Input Arrays for Overloaded Functions

Overloadable Operations

$OVERLOAD{nomethod}

Autogeneration of Functions

$OVERLOAD{fallback}

$OVERLOAD{‘=’}

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 8—BROWSING THE LIBRARY: MODULES

Session 1—The Perl Library

Library Files

Modules

Pragmas

The integer Pragma

The subs Pragma

Prototypes

The strict Pragma

Other Pragmas

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—English, Time, Syslog, and POD

English

English

Time

Time::Local

Syslog

Sys::Syslog

POD: Plain Old Documentation

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Making Modules

Exporter

AutoLoader

AutoSplit

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Getopt and Assert

Getopt

Getopt::Std

Getopt::Long

Assert

assert.pl

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Inspecting and Testing

Config

Config

Env

Env

Cwd

Cwd

Benchmark

Benchmark

Sys

Sys::Hostname

Dumpvar

dumpvar.pl

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Files

File

File::Find

File::Finddepth

File::Checktree

File::Basename

FileHandle

FileHandle

Flush

flush.pl

Stat

stat.pl

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Text, Search, and Math

Text

text::abbrev

Text::Soundex

Text::Tabs

Text::ParseWords

Search

Search::Dict

Math

Math::BigInt

Math::BigFloat

bigrat.pl

Math::Complex

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Dotsh.pl, Term, and Posix

dotsh.pl

dotsh.pl

Term

Term::Cap

Term::Complete

POSIX

POSIX

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 9—PUSHING THE ENVELOPE: PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Session 1—Eval()

Trapping Fatal Errors

Assembling Functions

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Signals

Trapping Signals

$SIG{__WARN__} and $SIG{__DIE__}

The sigtrap Pragma

Sending Signals

Alarm

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Exec() And Fork()

exec()

Special Characters in Perl vs. Special Characters in UNIX Shells

Forking Processes

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Process Attributes

Changing the Process Name

Getting the PID of the Parent Process

Process Priorities

Process Groups

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Wait(), Pipe(), Open2, And Open3

Waiting for Another Process to Finish

What’s a Blocking Operation?

Pipes

Open2 and Open3

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced I/O

select()

File Control with fcntl()

I/O Control with ioctl()

Term::ReadKey

Term::ReadLine

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Syscall() And Compiling Perl

System Calls

Compiling Perl

The Perl Compiler

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—System V Interprocess Communication

Message Queues

Semaphores

Shared Memory

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 10—WHEN GOOD PROGRAMS GO BAD: DEBUGGING

Session 1—How To Fix It

Warnings

Checking Syntax

Diagnostics

Bugs in Perl

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Perl Pitfalls

Lists vs. Scalars

Functions Seek Out Argument Lists

Functions

Syntax and Logic

Operators

Regular Expressions

Precedence

Scoping

Sorting

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Error Messages

Array Found Where Operator Expected

Can’t Bless Non-Reference Value

Can’t Coerce…

Can’t Find String Terminator

Can’t Locate…

Can’t Locate…

Can’t Modify Constant Item…

Can’t Return Outside a Subroutine

Can’t Write to Temp File for -e

Deep Recursion on Subroutine

…Follows Nothing in regexp

INFINITE LOOP 1 (Not an Actual Error Message)

INFINITE LOOP 2 (Not an Actual Error Message)

INFINITE LOOP 3 (Not an Actual Error Message)

INFINITE LOOP 4 (Not an Actual Error Message)

INFINITE LOOP 5 (Not an Actual Error Message)

Literal Array Now Requires Backslash at Program Line 2, Within String

Modification of a Read-Only Value

Nested *?+ in regexp

Not Enough Arguments

Number Found Where Operator Expected

…Permission Denied

Precedence Problem

Recompile Perl with -DDEBUGGING to Use -D Switch

Sort Subroutine Didn’t Return a Numeric Value

substr Outside of String

Syntax Error…

Type of arg to Keys Must Be Hash

Undefined sort Subroutine…

Undefined Subroutine…

…Unmatched [] in regexp

Unquoted String May Clash with Future Reserved Word

Use of Uninitialized Value

Use of … Is Deprecated

Useless Use…

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Using the Debugger

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Advanced Debugging

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—-Ddebugging

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Error Handling

Caller

Exceptions

Carp

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Efficiency

Minimizing Time

Easy Choices

Hard Choices

Minimizing Space

Easy Choices

Hard Choices

Profiling Your Code

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 11—LOCK AND KEY: SECURITY AND DATABASES

Session 1—Unix Users and Groups

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Unix Setuid Scripts and the Safe module

Real vs. Effective UIDs

setuid Bits

Tainted Variables

The Safe Module

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Encryption

crypt()

DES

RSA

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Tied Variables

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Database Modules

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—DBI, the Database Interface

Using DBI

DBI Methods

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Non-DBI Interfaces, Part I

Oracle

Sybase

Informix

Ingres

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Non-DBI Interfaces, Part II

Interbase

UNIFY

Postgres

C-Tree

C-ISAM

X.500

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 12—SURFING ON OYSTERS: PERL AND THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Session 1—A World Wide Web Primer

HTML

Links and URLs

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Generating WWW Pages

CGI

Getting CGI to Find Your Perl Scripts

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—HTML Forms

Radio Buttons

Checkboxes

<SELECT>

<TEXTAREA>

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Images, Audio, and Video

Images

Audio, Video, and Noninlined Images

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Perl/Web Resources

perlWWW

CGI.pm

libwww-perl

The CGI Module Set

The URI Module Set

The HTTP Module Set

The HTML Module Set

The WWW Module Set

The MIME Module Set

The LWP Module Set

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Running a WWW Server

Plexus

phttpd

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Advanced Webbery

Security

Netscape, SSL, and HTTPS

Firewalls

Dynamic Documents

Java

Penguin

Server Push and Client Pull

Weblint, htmlchek, linkcheck, and verify_links

Weblint

htmlchek

linkcheck

verify_links

webget and url_get

webget

url_get

Mail

MHonArc

Hypermail

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Non-Web Internet Services

FTP

IRC

WAIS

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 13—SPREADING THE WORD: NETWORKING

Session 1—How the Internet Works

Protocol Layers

Ports

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—Networking Utilities

rsh

comm.pl and chat2.pl

inetd

Quiz2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Sockets

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Multiuser Services

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Interactive Services

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Bulletproofing Servers

Zombie Processes

Reusing Local Addresses

Server Exclusivity

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Advanced Sockets

Using socketpair() to Create a Two-Way Pipe

Socket Addresses

Socket Control

shutdown()

send() and recv()

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Network Databases

Hosts

Services

Protocols

Networks

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard

CHAPTER 14—TOWER OF BABEL: PERL AND OTHER LANGUAGES

Session 1—X

Tcl, Tk, X: What’s the Difference?

General Perl/Tk Information

Simple Tk Programs

Quiz 1

Exercise 1

Session 2—More X

Text Widgets and Dialog Boxes

Animation

Tk Utilities

Quiz 2

Exercise 2

Session 3—Curses

Quiz 3

Exercise 3

Session 4—Awk, Sed, and Find

awk

sed

find

Quiz 4

Exercise 4

Review

Session 5—Using C from Perl

The Perl Compiler

The C Preprocessor

Source Filtering

Using C Functions and Libraries

Extensions

XS

Linking a C Function into Perl

Linking a C Library into Perl

Quiz 5

Exercise 5

Session 6—Advanced XS

Modifying Input Arguments and Passing Strings to an XSUB

Multiple XSUBs

The CODE: keyword

Types and the typemap

Quiz 6

Exercise 6

Session 7—Using Perl from C

Quiz 7

Exercise 7

Session 8—Using the Perl Stack from C

Playing with the Stack

The perl_call_ Functions

Quiz 8

Exercise 8

Review

Chapter Exercise

Easy

Medium

Moderate

Hard