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Using Web Templates for Web Design: Tips and Best Practices
Perl
Perl
PERL (Practical Extraction and Report Language) is an interpreted scripting programming language created to streamline the administration of a computer network. PERL is a highly portable language widely used in writing CGI (Common Gateway Interface) scripts, the standard means of performing actions, like searching or running applications when the user clicks on certain buttons or other parts of a Web page.
PERL is used to create CGI applications. The same application could have been written in C or Pascal to produce the same result, but PERL is an interpreted language and is therefore much easier to change in real-time environments.
Typically, a PERL script is created using an interface called CGI (Common Gateway Interface). It is called by a Web server as a single system process (sort of like typing "dir" at the DOS command prompt). It executes by listing all the files within a directory and ends by exiting. Only one "dir" can happen at one time per command prompt. Instead of doing a "dir" at the command prompt, the server issues a system call that creates a new process (command prompt). Instead of calling "dir" it calls "perl dosomecgi.pl." After the script is run, the output is redirected to the Web server, then streamed to the client browser.
