Perl
Perl is an incredibly flexible (and therefore complicated)
programming language. We'll just see the very, very beginnings of
it today.
Type
%> man perl
to see just the tip of the iceberg.
Note: I am not a Perl expert! Good references
include perl.org.
The Wikipedia Perl entry
is not a bad starting place either.
Basics:
--"The Swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages"
--"There is more than one way to do it"
--Good at text handling as well as data handling and, well, everything
else.
Command line
Perl can do command line stuff that is similar,
more or less, to the awk/sed/grep stuff you've mastered.
The easiest way to learn how to do it is with examples.
The Scriptome has lots and lots of "command line" examples to
do things to various data files. Wherever it says "biology" just
substitute physics/astronomy/engineering/whatever.
Start messing around with the Scriptome tools. This is part
of your exercise for this time.
Programs
Perl commands can also be written into programs of any
length. It is a real, full-on programming language.
A lot of information about the language can
be found here.
A list of functions can be found here.
Here is a basic tutorial for Perl programming (from
perl.com) -- read it.
Exercise
Now go do the exercise, which is basically
just to practice the things that you've just read.