Unix Programming with Perl

By Chris Nehren (‎apeiron‎) from Dahut.pm, Philadelphia.pm, NY.pm
Date: Saturday, 15 January 2011 11:10
Duration: 40 minutes
Target audience: Beginner
Language:
Tags: fork hookers ipc oldschool programming signals sockets unix

This talk is in­spired by peo­ple com­ing onto Freenode's #perl (and mag­net's #perl-help) and as­k­ing about how to do th­ings with threads, as­sum­ing it's the only way to do multi­process­ing in perl. It's also in­spired by an in­cident on Freenode #perl where I had to ex­plain fork() to some­one. More than 20 years ago, perl originated as the "port­able dis­til­la­tion of the Unix cul­ture" (a quote from the Camel book). Yet it seems the newer genera­tions of Perl hack­ers are los­ing sight of this and in­stead focus­ing on threads and ig­nor­ing perl's rich heritage. Hopeful­ly this talk will serve to part­ly fix the situa­tion. Pre­sent­ly the idea is to de­velop a small, pre­fork­ing Web serv­er that il­lustrates as many Uni­x­isms as pos­sible: fork­ing, sign­al han­dl­ing / sen­d­ing, stats avail­able via a Unix soc­ket, and other good­ies. The talk is aimed at the Perl be­ginn­er who eith­er hasn't com­mit­ted per­lipc to mem­o­ry, or who wants a con­crete ex­am­ple of all the con­cepts work­ing in close for­ma­tion. Howev­er, more ad­vanced pro­gramm­ers who haven't dug into Perl's Unixy bits should also walk away hav­ing lear­ned some­th­ing new.