gibsonca has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

My (windows) PC died and I have transitioned over to my Mac. I've been considering not replacing my windows PC. What is the environment like for developing Perl on a Mac? Is there a command like DOS window there? Thanks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: MAC Perl
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jul 27, 2010 at 21:12 UTC

    Current Macs are FreeBSD Unix under the hood. Check the Applications / Utilities folder for an app called Terminal for a quick start in the *nix idiom. There are Xemacs and various sorts of things too; Google around if you prefer that type of environment. You will probably have to install the dev tools (should be on one of your install disks and can be downloaded from Apple if necessary) to get the make and C stuff you need.

    (Update: EEETOOMANY.)

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Re: MAC Perl
by pemungkah (Priest) on Jul 28, 2010 at 01:54 UTC
    You bet. Terminal.app (in /Applications/Utilities, if I recall properly) provides this. It's the Unix bash shell rather than DOS, but you can do the same things. I've done a fair amount of development there and I like it.

    For installing command-line software, I'd recommend MacPorts, which will allow you to download and install your own versions (in /opt/local) of commands.

    As many have recommended before, building your own Perl with MacPorts is a good idea rather than messing with the system Perl, as Apple may upgrade or change it anytime they do a system update.

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Re: MAC Perl
by wazoox (Prior) on Jul 28, 2010 at 10:26 UTC
    Perl is already installed on Mac OS X (like on all Unix systems). All you need is an editor; all common Unix editors (Emacs, vim) are pre-installed, too. There are other options, I personnally like Smultron which is light and unobtrusive.
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Re: MAC Perl
by aquarium (Curate) on Jul 28, 2010 at 06:27 UTC
    Apart from the more commercial offerings, I'd recommend macvim, as a good vi editor...if you've been using gvim on windows.
    on the more dev side of things, you can probably download a software stack like MAMP (Mac: Apache, MySQL, Perl) which is an equivalent of LAMP for Linux and WAMP for windows.
    the hardest line to type correctly is: stty erase ^H
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Re: MAC Perl
by Gangabass (Vicar) on Jul 28, 2010 at 02:46 UTC
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