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Perl

A high-level, general-purpose programming language.

Perl combines features from C, sed, awk, and shell scripting into a single language that is exceptionally good at text processing and rapid scripting. Larry Wall created it in 1987, and Perl was the dominant language for early CGI web programs throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s. The slogan "There is more than one way to do it" captures Perl's design philosophy: expressive flexibility over consistency.

The Perl 5 codebase has been continuously maintained since 1994, with releases moving through cautious feature additions without the cross-version breakage that the parallel Perl 6 / Raku effort eventually introduced. CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, hosts more than 200,000 modules and was the first major language-specific package repository — a model later adopted by Python (PyPI), Ruby (RubyGems), and JavaScript (npm).

Perl 5 remains in active maintenance and ships on virtually every Linux system. Many distribution build scripts, system utilities (most notably webmin and various sysadmin tools), git's own porcelain (git-svn, git-cvsimport), and a substantial amount of bioinformatics and genomics software are written in Perl. The Perl 5 Porters group governs the language under GPL-1.0+ / Artistic License dual licensing.

Perl is preinstalled on most Linux distributions. To install
explicitly:
  Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install perl
  Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install perl
  Arch:          sudo pacman -S perl
  macOS:         brew install perl