Manpages

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A Perl program executes only once, not once for each input line. You can do an implicit loop with "-n" or "-p".

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The English module, loaded via

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Semicolons are required after all simple statements in Perl (except at the end of a block). Newline is not a statement delimiter.

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Curly brackets are required on "if"s and "while"s.

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Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.

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Arrays index from 0. Likewise string positions in substr() and index().

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You have to decide whether your array has numeric or string indices.

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Hash values do not spring into existence upon mere reference.

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You have to decide whether you want to use string or numeric comparisons.

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Reading an input line does not split it for you. You get to split it to an array yourself. And the split() operator has different arguments than awk’s.

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The current input line is normally in $_, not $0. It generally does not have the newline stripped. ($0 is the name of the program executed.) See perlvar.

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$<digit> does not refer to fields--it refers to substrings matched by the last match pattern.

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The print() statement does not add field and record separators unless you set $, and "$\". You can set $OFS and $ORS if you’re using the English module.

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You must open your files before you print to them.

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The range operator is "..", not comma. The comma operator works as in C.

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The match operator is "=~", not "~". ("~" is the one’s complement operator, as in C.)

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The exponentiation operator is "**", not "^". "^" is the XOR operator, as in C. (You know, one could get the feeling that awk is basically incompatible with C.)

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The concatenation operator is ".", not the null string. (Using the null string would render "/pat/ /pat/" unparsable, because the third slash would be interpreted as a division operator--the tokenizer is in fact slightly context sensitive for operators like "/", "?", and ">". And in fact, "." itself can be the beginning of a number.)

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The "next", "exit", and "continue" keywords work differently.

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The following variables work differently:

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You cannot set $RS to a pattern, only a string.

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When in doubt, run the awk construct through a2p and see what it gives you.

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Curly brackets are required on "if"’s and "while"’s.

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You must use "elsif" rather than "else if".

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The "break" and "continue" keywords from C become in Perl "last" and "next", respectively. Unlike in C, these do not work within a "do { } while" construct. See "Loop Control" in perlsyn.

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The switch statement is called "given"/"when" and only available in perl 5.10 or newer. See "Switch Statements" in perlsyn.

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Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.

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Comments begin with "#", not "/*" or "//". Perl may interpret C/C ++ comments as division operators, unterminated regular expressions or the defined-or operator.

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You can’t take the address of anything, although a similar operator in Perl is the backslash, which creates a reference.

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"ARGV" must be capitalized. $ARGV[0] is C’s "argv[1]", and "argv[0]" ends up in $0.

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System calls such as link(), unlink(), rename(), etc. return nonzero for success, not 0. (system(), however, returns zero for success.)

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Signal handlers deal with signal names, not numbers. Use "kill -l" to find their names on your system.

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In Perl, binary "+" is always addition. "$string1 + $string2" converts both strings to numbers and then adds them. To concatenate two strings, use the "." operator.

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The "+" unary operator doesn’t do anything in Perl. It exists to avoid syntactic ambiguities.

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Unlike "for...in", Perl’s "for" (also spelled "foreach") does not allow the left-hand side to be an arbitrary expression. It must be a variable:

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To iterate over the indices of an array, use "foreach my $i (0 .. $#array) {}". "foreach my $v (@array) {}" iterates over the values.

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Perl requires braces following "if", "while", "foreach", etc.

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In Perl, "else if" is spelled "elsif".

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"? :" has higher precedence than assignment. In JavaScript, one can write:

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Perl requires semicolons to separate statements.

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Variables declared with "my" only affect code after the declaration. You cannot write "$x = 1; my $x;" and expect the first assignment to affect the same variable. It will instead assign to an $x declared previously in an outer scope, or to a global variable.

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"my" variables are scoped to the current block, not to the current function. If you write "{my $x;} $x;", the second $x does not refer to the one declared inside the block.

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An object’s members cannot be made accessible as variables. The closest Perl equivalent to "with(object) { method() }" is "for", which can alias $_ to the object:

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The object or class on which a method is called is passed as one of the method’s arguments, not as a separate "this" value.

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A Perl program executes only once, not once for each input line. You can do an implicit loop with "-n" or "-p".

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Backreferences in substitutions use "$" rather than "\".

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The pattern matching metacharacters "(", ")", and "|" do not have backslashes in front.

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The range operator is "...", rather than comma.

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The backtick operator does variable interpolation without regard to the presence of single quotes in the command.

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The backtick operator does no translation of the return value, unlike csh.

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Shells (especially csh) do several levels of substitution on each command line. Perl does substitution in only certain constructs such as double quotes, backticks, angle brackets, and search patterns.

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Shells interpret scripts a little bit at a time. Perl compiles the entire program before executing it (except for "BEGIN" blocks, which execute at compile time).

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The arguments are available via @ARGV, not $1, $2, etc.

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The environment is not automatically made available as separate scalar variables.

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The shell’s "test" uses "=", "!=", "<" etc for string comparisons and "-eq", "-ne", "-lt" etc for numeric comparisons. This is the reverse of Perl, which uses "eq", "ne", "lt" for string comparisons, and "==", "!=" "<" etc for numeric comparisons.

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Remember that many operations behave differently in a list context than they do in a scalar one. See perldata for details.

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Avoid barewords if you can, especially all lowercase ones. You can’t tell by just looking at it whether a bareword is a function or a string. By using quotes on strings and parentheses on function calls, you won’t ever get them confused.

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You cannot discern from mere inspection which builtins are unary operators (like chop() and chdir()) and which are list operators (like print() and unlink()). (Unless prototyped, user-defined subroutines can only be list operators, never unary ones.) See perlop and perlsub.

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People have a hard time remembering that some functions default to $_, or @ARGV, or whatever, but that others which you might expect to do not.

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The < FH > construct is not the name of the filehandle, it is a readline operation on that handle. The data read is assigned to $_ only if the file read is the sole condition in a while loop:

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Remember not to use "=" when you need "=~"; these two constructs are quite different:

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The "do {}" construct isn’t a real loop that you can use loop control on.

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Use "my()" for local variables whenever you can get away with it (but see perlform for where you can’t). Using "local()" actually gives a local value to a global variable, which leaves you open to unforeseen side-effects of dynamic scoping.

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If you localize an exported variable in a module, its exported value will not change. The local name becomes an alias to a new value but the external name is still an alias for the original.