Perl Hello World Example: How To Write and Execute Perl Program on Unix OS

Question: I would like to understand the basics of how to write and execute Perl program on Linux OS. Can you explain it with a simple example?

Answer: In this article, let us review very quickly how to write a basic Hello World Perl program and execute *.pl program on Linux or Unix OS.

1. Write a Hello World Perl Program

Create the helloworld.pl program using a Vim editor as shown below.

$ vim helloworld.pl

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Hello world perl program

print "Hello World!";

2. Make sure Perl Interpreter is installed on your system

Make sure perl interpreter is installed on your system as shown below.

$ whereis perl
perl: /usr/bin/perl /etc/perl /usr/lib/perl
/usr/share/perl /usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz

$ which perl
/usr/bin/perl

3. Execute the Perl Program

You can either execute using “perl helloworld.pl” or “./helloworld.pl”.

$ perl helloworld.pl
Hello World!

( or )
$ chmod u+x helloworld.pl

$ ./helloworld.pl
Hello World!

Note: As perl is an interpreted language, you don’t have the compilation step similar to the C program.

4. Writing and Executing Perl One liner

You can also execute perl from the command line as shown below. This will print Hello World!.

perl -e 'print "Hello World!\n"'

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