COMP 2400 Software Tools

Goals: 

• Understand Perl regular expressions & file handling
  • Write templates to match a pattern
  • Retrieve matched portions
  • Special variables $_, $1, ...,$9, $`, $&, and $' (remembering patterns)
  • Exercise (cont.) Download all .pdf & .tar.gz extension files from a popular Perl book webpage

    -- get the index.html page by issuing a wget command
    -- parse it for the URLs
    -- write the URLs to a file
    -- issue a wget for each URL from this file

Useful commands/tips:

• to run a command from within a Perl script, enclose it between a pair of backticks, e.g.
  `wget URL`; 

Useful Links:

• Perl Book

Online Tutorial:

• Perl introductory tutorial

Handouts:

• Project 2