Practical UNIX

Commonly Used Functions in Perl

Although it would take 100 pages or more to give a brief description of all the functions of Perl, it is adequate to list some of the common functions dealing with arrays, lists, and scalars, giving the novice the ability to make some very powerful and complex tools. Therefore, this section gives a brief description and provides examples for some of the most commonly used functions. Before this occurs, a few points need to be made about functions in general.

Functions can be used as terms in an expression. Some of these functions take on a list as an argument. Such a list can be any combination of scalar and list values, but the entire list will be treated as a single dimensional list value. Elements in a list ...