Let us now look at how we write our first perl program that will be used as a CGI script.
We will learn three main things in here:
Format of a Perl program
Every Perl program MUST obey the following format:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
Strictly speaking the first line is only required for running Perl programs on UNIX machines. Since that is the intended destination of most of our Perl scripts. It is a good idea to make this the first line of every perl program.
Output from Perl
To output from a Perl script you use the print statement:
\n
characters:
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n";Finally -- Our complete script
Recall that our Perl CGI script must output the header and HTML code and must begin with a special first line.
Our complete first (hello.pl) program (with nice comments) is a follows:
#!/usr/local/bin/perl # hello.pl - My first CGI program print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n"; # Note there is a newline between # this header and Data # Simple HTML code follows print "<html> <head>\n"; print "<title>Hello, world!</title>"; print "</head>\n"; print "<body>\n"; print "<h1>Hello, world!</h1>\n"; print "</body> </html>\n";