Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

Day 18. Perl and the Operating System

Throughout this book I've been focusing on those features of Perl that behave the same whether you're running your scripts on a Unix system, under Windows, or on a Mac (or at least I've been letting you know about the differences where they exist). Fortunately, as far as the core language is concerned, there aren't too many issues surrounding writing cross-platform scripts; a hash is a hash is a hash, regardless of where you're looking at it.

There are other features of Perl, however, that are not portable. Some of these are historical—because Perl was developed for Unix, many of its built-in features relate to features of Unix that simply don't exist on other platforms. Other features are contained in platform-specific ...