I have looked through a number of tutorials, but I still can't figure out what I am doing wrong... I am trying the code below (in a .pl Perl file, as an executable):
#!/usr/bin/perl
perl -e 'print "Hello";'
I run this script and get:
Execution of /home/user1/Desktop/file_backups.pl aborted due to compilation errors.
(I'm new to using Perl to call the Linux command line.)
Try:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This is a comment ~~~
# This script will be run as a Perl script
# since 'perl' isn't a keyword or function in Perl
# something like this must fail:
#
# perl -e 'print "Hello";'
#
# The following should work.
print "Hello"; print " World\n";
Or, if you want your shell script to execute Perl code:
#!/bin/sh
# That's a Bash script ~~~
# It's just a command line in a file ...
perl -e 'print "Hello World";'
Background: #! is an interpreter directive.
When the command is executed, it is converted to an execution of the interpreter.
Just type on the command line (not in a file):
perl -e 'print "Hello World\n";'
This is only really good for one-liners. Longer scripts need their own file.
perl is not a valid command inside a Perl script. If you had named that file as a .sh script, and used #!/bin/bash on the shebang line, it would have worked, but it doesn't really make a lot of sense to write a bash file just to invoke Perl (why not invoke Perl directly?)
Since you mentioned you want to interact with the command line, I'll mention here that you can get at the command line options within Perl via the @ARGV array. (See perldoc perlvar.)
This should work. Double quotes outside single quotes inside ;)
perl -e "print 'Hello'"
Say you have the following inputs:
$ for i in a b c ; do echo "$i is $i" > $i; done $ cat a b c a is a b is b c is c
Everybody knows capital letters are much better!
perl -i.bak -pe '$_ = uc' a b c
So now
$ cat a b c A IS A B IS B C IS C
But we'd really like to can this in a command called upcase, and that's easy to do!
#! /usr/bin/perl -pi.bak
$_ = uc
See it at work:
$ for i in a b c ; do echo "$i is $i" > $i; done $ cat a b c a is a b is b c is c $ ./upcase a b c $ !cat cat a b c A IS A B IS B C IS C
More tips from an answer to a similar question:
The
-eoption introduces Perl code to be executed—which you might think of as a script on the command line—so drop it and stick the code in the body. Leave-pin the shebang (#!) line.In general, it's safest to stick to at most one "clump" of options in the shebang line. If you need more, you could always throw their equivalents inside a
BEGIN {}block.Don't forget to turn on the execute bit!
chmod +x script-name
You might be trying to do this:
system("/usr/bin/perl -e 'print \"Hello!\\\\n\";'");
Since you said you're looking for the opposite, this may be what you mean:
# vi stdin.pl
# cat stdin.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl
while(<STDIN>)
{
if( /^hello/ ){ print "Hello back to ya!\n"; }
}
# chmod 0777 stdin.pl
# ./stdin.pl
foo
hello
Hello back to ya!
#