Category Archives: Perl

The Programmable Web - Yahoo Pipes

May 30, 2007 –

Yahoo created one of the most innovative web tools I’ve ever seen. Yahoo Pipes lets you do all kinds of conversions and filtering on the web without requiring a web host to host your programs. If you want to convert XML/RSS data to other XML/RSS then look no further. This is a list of several useful pipes I’ve created.

By engtech | Also posted in IDT Labs Software Development, Technology, Yahoo Pipes | Comments (10)

Show Your Geek Love with Code Poetry (in Perl)

February 14, 2007 –

programming poetry in perl 

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Perl is the best language,
There's nothing it can't do.

But what about programming poetry?

By engtech | Also posted in Humor, Technology | Comments (8)

Blog Housekeeping: Cleaning Up Dead Links on Your WordPress.com Blog

September 15, 2006 –

I haven’t checked my site for dead links yet, so I’ll do it for the first time. Here’s how:

By engtech | Also posted in Technology, WordPress.com Tips | Comments (2)

Using Perl on Windows Part 1: Installing ActiveState Perl

September 08, 2006 –

When I want to get something done with Windows XP, I have a habit of using Perl because I’m very familiar with it (I’m a Unix geek).
Luckily, Perl is available as a Windows executable thanks to the people at ActiveState. This guide will show you how to install ActiveState Perl on Windows.
Installing Perl isn’t [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Technology | Comments (2)

Perl Oneliner for date calculation

July 27, 2006 –

Perl is great for writing oneliner scripts to do simple task. I’m often confounded that there are no inherent unix utilities for doing date arithmetic / calculations, since so many unix utilities require the date as an option. Thanks to the Perl Date::Calc module, that isn’t an issue.
Here’s a one liner to find out what [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Asides, Technology | Comments (6)

Presentation Tutorials on Regular Expressions and Perl

May 28, 2006 –

Turing Labs have some good tutorials on system administration, but what stuck out for me were some excellent presentation slides for regular expressions and perl. These would be great for someone who wants to do quick refresh of something they already know, but it would be even better for putting together a quick lunch-time learning [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Links, Technology | Comments (0)

Doing it Better - Avoiding backticking `pwd`, `find .`, and `mkdir -p` in Perl

May 28, 2006 –

When writing perl scripts, it can seem very natural to incorporate shell commands using backticks. Unfortunately, this is almost always the wrong thing to do because you are introducing a dependency on an external program without adding any of the necessary logic that might be required for portability. This isn't a very big issue for a one-off throw-away script, but in a work environment, scripts have a bad habit of being extended and reused well past your initial intentions.

By engtech | Also posted in Asides, Technology | Comments (0)

Verilog-Perl - Perl modules for interacting with Verilog code

May 23, 2006 –

 Verilog-Perl is a collection of perl modules for interacting with Verilog code. I haven't given it much of a look as of yet, but if "vpm" and "vppp" work as the synopsis advertises then it may have some utility. Especially if it can already correctly parse SystemVerilog.

Verilog::Getopt parses command line options similar to C++ and [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Hardware Engineering, Links, Technology | Comments (3)

Safe Scripting in Perl — don’t trust the user

May 06, 2006 –

This covers some interesting thoughts about using Perl from a security perspective where you don't trust the user.

Use taint to make sure that tainted variables (that came from user input or environment variables) never make it into system/exec calls.
When using an optimized regular expression, use the /Q /E metacharacter to prevent an eval statement from [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Links, Technology | Comments (0)

symbolic link checker in Perl and script to find biggest files

April 27, 2006 –

These are a couple of perl utilities I've found useful.
linkcheck.pl is for finding broken symbolic links. biggest.sh is for finding the largest file on a file system (ie: when you've run out of diskspace and you need to find the culprit)
linkcheck.pl looks for all links on the local file system and tests each link's integrity–to [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Links, Linux and Unix, Technology | Comments (0)

Perl Doxygen Filter — Automatically Document Your Perl Code

April 20, 2006 –

About Perl Doxygen Filter
Of course, Perl developers are used to use POD rather than some other code documentation tools. However, most developers actually are not restricted to using one single language. Instead of using multiple code documentation systems one tends to use one tool for all - Doxygen is quite a powerful code documentation system [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Links, Technology, Writing Better Documentation | Comments (1)

Linklint - fast html link checker in Perl

April 19, 2006 –

Linklint - fast html link checker
I've used this tool for checking intranet HTML documentation I took over that was poorly maintained. It will generate a summary like the following as well generating HTML results that show all of the missing links, etc.
Linklint found 196 files in 3 directories and checked 136 html files. There were [...]

By engtech | Also posted in Technology | Comments (3)

Perl one-liner for replacing text in a file.

April 19, 2006 –

perl -w -i -p -e's/string/string/g;' $*;

By engtech | Also posted in Asides, Technology | Comments (0)