AIX Tip of the Week: Use Perl to Create Web Pages

Audience: AIX Administrators and End Users

Date: June 6, 2000

Perl (Practical Extraction Report Language) is a programming language that combines the best features of sed, awk, and C programs, with the convenience of shell scripts. Some of Perl's uses include:

• Write shell scripts
• Extract/combine data from one or more files
• "Clean" data prior to importing into a database
• Create CGI programs to dynamically build web pages.

  The attached Perl programs illustrate some of these capabilities. The first, mk-index.pl, builds the AIX Tip Archive web page at http://www.aiche-norcal.org/AIXtip. It builds the index page by extracting descriptive information from each AIX Tip file in the directory, sorts the tips by category, builds the HTML file with hyperlinks, and appends a red "New" label if the tip file is newer than 8 days.
  mk_index.pl

  Perl is standard in AIX 4.3.3, and can be obtained for prior releases from http://www-frec.bull.com/cgi-bin/list_dir.cgi/download/out/.

  ---