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Perl

Introduction#

Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier, it has since undergone many changes and revisions.

Perl provides a framework allowing users to easily extend the language by installing new modules in their local environment. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN1) is an archive of over 25,000 distributions of software written in Perl, as well as documentation for it. It is searchable at http://metacpan.org or http://search.cpan.org and mirrored in over 270 locations around the world.

More documentation#

The following documentation specifically intended for using Perl on Sherlock. For more complete documentation about Perl in general, please see the Perl documentation.

Perl modules on Sherlock#

To install Perl modules from CPAN, we recommend using the (provided) App::cpanminus module and local::lib modules:

  • App::cpanminus is a popular alternative CPAN client that can be used to manage Perl distributions. It has many great features, including uninstalling modules.
  • local::lib allows users to install Perl modules in the directory of their choice (typically their home directory) without administrative privileges.

Both are already installed on Sherlock, and are automatically enabled and configured when you load the perl module. You don't need to add anything in your ~/.bashrc file, the Sherlock perl module will automatically create everything that is required so you can directly run a command to install Perl modules locally.

Installation#

Perl modules installation is only necessary once

You only need to install Perl modules once on Sherlock. Since fielsystems are shared, modules installed on one node will immediately be available on all nodes on the cluster.

As an example, to install the DateTime::TimeZone module, you can do the following:

$ ml perl
$ cpanm DateTime::TimeZone

Usage#

Once installed, you can use the Perl modules directly, no specific options or syntax is required.

For instance, to check that the DateTime::TimeZone module is correctly installed:

$ perl -MDateTime::TimeZone -e 'print $DateTime::TimeZone::VERSION . "\n"';
2.13

Uninstallation#

To uninstall a Perl module:

$ cpanm -U DateTime::TimeZone

  1. CPAN can denote either the archive network itself, or the Perl program that acts as an interface to the network and as an automated software installer (somewhat like a package manager). Most software on CPAN is free and open source.