Dynamic DNS Services Update Scripts
Strangely
enough, I never had any need for a dynamic DNS service
until this week. In retrospect, it really does seem odd
that I've never needed such a service before now, but
so be it.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/1230.html
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12.30.04 |
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Text::Autoformat:
Smart Text Reformatting With Perl
I've
been using http://groups-beta.google.com/ for Newsgroup
posting for a while now. It's convenient for me because
of my nomadic life style where I have different ISP's
and often different machines with varying OSes. Google
only needs a browser, and they aren't overly fussy about
that, either.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/1202.html
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12.02.04 |
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Handling
Missing Data In Inputs
Missing
data can be very annoying to a programmer. In fact, it
is so annoying that very often we'll write separate programs
to clean up data and eliminate unpleasant conditions so
that the main program doesn't have to deal with it. Here,
I'll show some examples of the kind of problems we see.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/1028.html
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10.28.04 |
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PERL
Extensibility Enhancements
This
release adds the first major platform addition to the
NerveCenter product line in years - support for Red Hat
Enterprise Linux - as well as significant performance
enhancements to NerveCenter's industry-standard PERL extensibility
for all supported platforms.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/1014.html
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10.14.04 |
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Hacking
Perl in Nightclubs
I've
found the experiences of dancing and programming to have
a great deal in common. With both I am immersed in an
abstract world of animated structures, building up and
breaking down many times before finally reaching a conclusion.
Indeed, when the operation of even the dullest data-munging
computer program is visualized, for example in a debugger,
it does seem to be dancing around its loops and conditions
-- moving in patterns through time.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0909.html
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09.09.04 |
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Perl's
Special Variables
One
of the best ways to make your Perl code look more like
... well, like Perl code -- and not like C or BASIC or
whatever you used before you were introduced to Perl --
is to get to know the internal variables that Perl uses
to control various aspects of your program's execution.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0622.html
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06.22.04 |
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Thinking
In Perl
Not
many people would argue that Perl is not one of the most
flexible and useful scripting languages available today.
Most, however, cannot look past that to see it as a programming
language, and a powerful one at that. No one will argue
that they could develop a prototype of a product in Java
faster than they could in Perl, yet most would abandon
Perl as soon as development "gets serious." After all,
Perl is just a scripting language. No one in their right
mind would attempt to use it for anything besides CGI
and gluing other programs together.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0610.html
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06.10.04 |
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Useful
Perl Scripts With Regular Expressions
Most
computer users, especially software engineers, have had
a need to modify multiple files to either add a line of
text, modify a line of text, or completely remove a line
of text. The problem is that there never seems to be a
piece of software out there that can help you with this
problem. Some programs let you get close to doing what
you want but in my experience none ever let you do exactly
what you want; so a few hours are spent opening each file
and editing them manually.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0527.html
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05.27.04 |
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Platforms
for Testing and Publishing
ometimes
you just need a simple test platform to check out Perl
or PHP applications as either stand-alone apps and Web
scripts. We just discovered a cool open-source system
that offers exactly that: IndigoPerl from IndigoStar Software.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0513.html
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05.13.04 |
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Avoiding
backticks in Perl
In
Perl, backticks (``) and the system and exec functions
provide a convenient means to run external programs. While
these methods are easy to use in personal scripts, security
problems can result from their use in Common Gateway Interface
(CGI) scripts on a webserver or in multiuser environments
where the script has elevated privileges. Examples of
insecure code are demonstrated below. Replacement code
and other methods of handling potential security problems-
such as input validation and using perl’s taint mode-
are then illustrated.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0415.html
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04.15.04 |
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Getopt
And Getopts
Both
"getopt" and getopts are tools to use for processing and
validating shell script arguments. They are similar, but
not identical. More confusingly, functionality may vary
from place to place, so you need to read the man pages
carefully if your usage is more than casual.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0311.html
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03.11.04 |
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Python
Vs. Perl
Perl
folk seem not to like Python, at least not at first glance.
It's easy to understand why: the languages serve similar
purposes, but have annoyingly different syntax and structure.
There have been converts, though, and Eric S. Raymond's
experiences are probably not atypical.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0212.html
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02.12.04 |
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Perl
Input
Perl
has wonderful I/O capabilities. I'm only going to cover
input here: reading from files or standard input. There
are two ways to do that (actually a lot more than two,
but this is supposed to be introductory material): you
can open a specific file, or you can pass files on the
command line and either open them individually or just
ignore the whole thing and pretend everything is coming
from STDIN.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0129.html
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01.29.04 |
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Improving
Perl Application Performance
A
fellow developer and I have been working on a data collection
application primarily written in Perl. The application
retrieves measurement files from a directory, parses the
files, performs some statistical calculations and writes
the results to a database. We needed to improve the application's
performance so that it would handle a considerable load
while being used in production.
http://www.perlpronews.com/2004/0122.html
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01.22.04 |
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