If you are on Mac OS X, then it's just like any other unix box. You can put your scripts whereever you like. You just have to tell perl where to find it.

$ perl hello.pl
$ perl some/dir/hello.pl
$ perl /Users/you/Desktop/hello.pl
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Write you scripts using any editor that will utilize Unix line endings (most all will... skEdit or TextWrangler or Smultron), save them, go to the terminal and chmod +x yourscript.pl, and then perl yourscript.pl

update: added links to text editors

• If you're going to run perl yourscript.pl then chmod +x yourscript.pl is not necessary.
• Mac OS X and other *n*x systems require a full path in the #! line.
• Putting . in your path is a bad habit. This can cause you to execute files in the current directory without meaning to. Just type ./yourscript.pl instead.

As has been said, if you're at a shell prompt OS X is pretty much like any other *NIX flavour. If you're looking for something you can click on from the Finder (or drop files onto) then you want to google for "DropScript" or "Platypus". These will wrap your perl in an OS X application and give it the right structure to run when you click on it.

# corrected:
perl -e 'code'
perl 'script'
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No this is not correct. Perl -e is for specifying the program text on the command line. Like

perl -e 'print "foo\n";'
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For simply running a script

perl script.pl
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is correct.

You can put the scripts wherever you like on your system. However, the location should be in your PATH environmental variable, or you'll have to type the complete path to your file.

In addition, you need to make sure the files have execute permissions and that they include the shebang line as the first line (#!/usr/bin/perl) in the file.

Once you've done that, you type perl scriptname.pl on the command line in the terminal. That's all you need. :)

HTH,

/Larry

Update: Fixed a couple of typos. :)

One more typo -- you'd type scriptname.pl after you've followed the rest of your instructions. As with any other perl box, you can run scripts one of two ways from the command line:

Placing the files in your $PATH.

If you want to call the file as the name of the file (eg, 'script.pl', then you'll want to use the first two paragraphs -- place the file in your $PATH, make sure it has execute (chmod u+x script.pl), and the proper shebang line... but you call it without calling perl on the command line.

Calling the perl executable with an argument.

This will not search your path, and will only search your local directory (or whatever path you specify. When called this way, you need perl in your path, but not the script. Also, the script doesn't need a shebang line, or be executable.

Update: if you want to make sure perl is in your path, type which perl at the command line. It's installed by default at /usr/bin/perl (but without critical header files that are needed to build new modules, at least in 10.3 server, as I found out today).

so, how would I go about finding out what's in my $PATH variable, using a one-liner?

---

My Website

Open Terminal, and type the following at the commahd line:

echo $PATH
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Letter case counts. :) Terminal will return a colon-separated string that contains your path information. You could put your scripts into any of the directories listed, however, I would recommend that you create a 'bin' directory in your Home directory and put your scripts there. Then, to execute your scripts, you'd type the following on the command line:

perl $HOME/bin/scriptname.pl
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or

perl /Users/yourusername/bin/scriptname.pl
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You can add directories to your PATH variable, but I'll leave that exciting task to you. (Hint: On the command line, type man bash.) :)

HTH,

/Larry

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
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setenv PATH ${PATH}:.
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