How to run Perl in an interactive shell

perl-shell.md

How to run Perl in an interactive shell

by Asim Jalis, MetaProse.com

An interactive shell is useful for quickly trying out different commands. While Ruby, Python, and Clojure come with interactive shells, Perl does not. However, it is easy to create one using this one-liner on Unix systems:

perl -e 'do{print("perl> ");$_x=<>;chomp $_x;print(eval($_x)."\n")}while($_x ne "q")'

To quit type q.

To make this easier to remember save the following text in a file called perli:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
do{print("perl> ");$_x=<>;chomp $_x;print(eval($_x)."\n")}while($_x ne "q")