Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours

UNIX Stuff

This portion of the hour is for the users of Perl working under the UNIX operating system. If you don't use Perl on a UNIX system, you can safely skip this section and not miss anything important; you can read it if you're curious about UNIX, however.

For UNIX users, you should know that Perl has a deep UNIX heritage, and some Perl functions come right from UNIX commands and OS functions. Most of these functions you will not use. Some functions—like unlink—come from UNIX but have meanings that are not really tied to UNIX at all. Every operating system deletes files, and Perl ensures that unlink does the right thing on every operating system. Perl makes a great effort to ensure that concepts—such as file I/O—that should be portable ...