Perl Programming Interview Questions And Answers

* Perl is a powerful free interpreter.
* Perl is portable, flexible and easy to learn.

you can just do something like this:
$ENV{'PATH'} = '...';
As you may remember, "%ENV" is a special hash in Perl that contains the value of all your environment variables.
Because %ENV is a hash, you can set environment variables just as you'd set the value of any Perl hash variable. Here's how you can set your PATH variable to make sure the following four directories are in your path::

$ENV{'PATH'} = '/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/home/yourname/bin';

Perl can have objects whose data cannot be accessed outside its class, but C++ cannot.

Perl can use closures with unreachable private data as objects, and C++ doesn't support closures. Furthermore, C++ does support pointer arithmetic via `int *ip = (int*)&object', allowing you do look all over the object. Perl doesn't have pointer arithmetic. It also doesn't allow `#define private public' to change access rights to foreign objects. On the other hand, once you start poking around in /dev/mem, no one is safe.

Data files are opened in Perl using the open() function. When you open a data file, all you have to do is specify (a) a file handle and (b) the name of the file you want to read from.
As an example, suppose you need to read some data from a file named "checkbook.txt". Here's a simple open statement that opens the checkbook file for read access: open (CHECKBOOK, "checkbook.txt"); In this example, the name "CHECKBOOK" is the file handle that you'll use later when reading from the checkbook.txt data file. Any time you want to read data from the checkbook file, just use the file handle named "CHECKBOOK".
Now that we've opened the checkbook file, we'd like to be able to read what's in it. Here's how to read one line of data from the checkbook file:
$record = < CHECKBOOK > ;
After this statement is executed, the variable $record contains the contents of the first line of the checkbook file. The "<>" symbol is called the line reading operator.
To print every record of information from the checkbook file

open (CHECKBOOK, "checkbook.txt") || die "couldn't open the file!";
while ($record = < CHECKBOOK >) {
print $record;
}
close(CHECKBOOK);

Here's code that just prints a listing of every file in the current directory:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
opendir(DIR, ".");
@files = readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);
foreach $file (@files) {
print "$filen";
}

Here's a snippet of code that just prints a listing of every file in the current directory that ends with the extension .html:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
opendir(DIR, ".");
@files = grep(/.html$/,readdir(DIR));
closedir(DIR);
foreach $file (@files) {
print "$filen";
}

There are two ways a Perl script can be run:
--from a command line, called one-liner, that means you type and execute immediately on the command line. You'll need the -e option to start like "C: %gt perl -e "print "Hello";". One-liner doesn't mean one Perl statement. One-liner may contain many statements in one line.
--from a script file, called Perl program.

Perl keeps track of your variables, whether dynamic or otherwise, and doesn't free things before you're done using them.

Perl is very forgiving of strange and sometimes wrong code, which can mean hours spent searching for bugs and weird results. Turning on warnings helps uncover common mistakes and strange places and save a lot of debugging time in the long run. There are various ways of turning on Perl warnings:

* For Perl one-liner, use -w option on the command line.
* On Unix or Windows, use the -w option in the shebang line (The first # line in the script). Note: Windows Perl interpreter may not require it.
* For other systems, choose compiler warnings, or check compiler documentation.

Perl has a flexible concept of data types. Scalar means a single thing, like a number or string. So the Java concept of int, float, double and string equals to Perl's scalar in concept and the numbers and strings are exchangeable. Scalar variable is a Perl variable that is used to store scalar data. It uses a dollar sign $ and followed by one or more alphanumeric characters or underscores. It is case sensitive.

Many Perl developers use the -w option of the interpreter, especially during the development stages of an application. This warning option turns on many warning messages that can help you understand and debug your applications.
To use this option on Unix systems, just include it on the first line of the program, like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
If you develop Perl apps on a DOS/Windows computer, and you're creating a program named myApp.pl, you can turn on the warning messages when you run your program like this:
perl -w myApp.pl

In php it will be like
if (isset($HTTP_POST_VARS)){
....
}
In perl, tried this.
if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq 'POST'){
.....
}

What is the output of the following Perl program?
1 $p1 = "prog1.java";
2 $p1 =~ s/(.*).java/$1.cpp/;
3 print "$p1n";

prog1.cpp

Because Perl patterns have backreferences.
A regular expression by definition must be able to determine the next state in the finite automaton without requiring any extra memory to keep around previous state. A pattern /([ab]+)c1/ requires the state machine to remember old states, and thus disqualifies such patterns as being regular expressions in the classic sense of the term.

Sends mail to root and exits.
It has been said that all programs advance to the point of being able to automatically read mail. While not quite at that point (well, without having a module loaded), Perl does at least automatically send it.

Here's a simple technique to process each element in a hash:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

%days = (
'Sun' =>'Sunday',
'Mon' => 'Monday',
'Tue' => 'Tuesday',
'Wed' => 'Wednesday',
'Thu' => 'Thursday',
'Fri' => 'Friday',
'Sat' => 'Saturday' );

foreach $key (sort keys %days) {
print "The long name for $key is $days{$key}.n";
}

Suppose we have a class of five students.
Their names are kim, al, rocky, chrisy, and jane.

Here's a test program that prints the contents
of the grades hash, sorted by student name:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

%grades = (
kim => 96,
al => 63,
rocky => 87,
chrisy => 96,
jane => 79,
);

print "ntGRADES SORTED BY STUDENT NAME:n";
foreach $key (sort (keys(%grades))) {
print "tt$key tt$grades{$key}n";
}


The output of this program looks like this:


GRADES SORTED BY STUDENT NAME:
al 63
chrisy 96
jane 79
kim 96
rocky 87



}

print scalar reverse scalar <FH>
Surprisingly enough, you have to put both the reverse and the <FH> into scalar context separately for this to work.

Sending e-mail from a Perl/CGI program on a Unix computer system is usually pretty simple. Most Perl programs directly invoke the Unix sendmail program. We'll go through a quick example here.
Assuming that you've already have e-mail information you need, such as the send-to address and subject, you can use these next steps to generate and send the e-mail message:
# the rest of your program is up here ...
open(MAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -t");
print MAIL "To: $sendToAddressn";
print MAIL "From: $myEmailAddressn";
print MAIL "Subject: $subjectn";
print MAIL "This is the message body.n";
print MAIL "Put your message here in the body.n";
close (MAIL);

Example 1:

To run the date command from a Perl program, and read the output
of the command, all you need are a few lines of code like this:

open(DATE, "date|");
$theDate = <DATE>;
close(DATE);

The open() function runs the external date command, then opens
a file handle DATE to the output of the date command.

Next, the output of the date command is read into
the variable $theDate through the file handle DATE.

Example 2:

The following code runs the "ps -f" command, and reads the output:

open(PS_F, "ps -f|");
while (<PS_F>) {
($uid,$pid,$ppid,$restOfLine) = split;
# do whatever I want with the variables here ...
}
close(PS_F);

Because y is a kind of quoting operator.
The y/// operator is the sed-savvy synonym for tr///. That means y(3) would be like tr(), which would be looking for a second string, as in tr/a-z/A-Z/, tr(a-z)(A-Z), or tr[a-z][A-Z].

False so long as f() returns false, after which it returns true until g() returns true, and then starts the cycle again.
This is scalar not list context, so we have the bistable flip-flop range operator famous in parsing of mail messages, as in `$in_body = /^$/ .. eof()'. Except for the first time f() returns true, g() is entirely ignored, and f() will be ignored while g() later when g() is evaluated. Double dot is the inclusive range operator, f() and g() will both be evaluated on the same record. If you don't want that to happen, the exclusive range operator, triple dots, can be used instead. For extra credit, describe this:
$bingo = ( a() .. b() ) ... ( c() .. d() );

Because you can inspect the argument count, return context, and object types all by yourself.
In Perl, the number of arguments is trivially available to a function via the scalar sense of @_, the return context via wantarray(), and the types of the arguments via ref() if they're references and simple pattern matching like /^d+$/ otherwise. In languages like C++ where you can't do this, you simply must resort to overloading of functions.

0
A defined (but false) 0 value is the proper indication of the end of file for read() and sysread().

$cur->new()->{LINK}
The indirect object syntax only has a single token lookahead. That means if new() is a method, it only grabs the very next token, not the entire following expression.
This is why `new $obj[23] arg' does't work, as well as why `print $fh[23] "stuffn"' does't work. Mixing notations between the OO and IO notations is perilous. If you always use arrow syntax for method calls, and nothing else, you'll not be surprised.