How many Perl scripts in Homebrew package manager ?
What is Perl ? 🔗
Perl is a high-level, interpreted, general-purpose programming language originally developed in 1987 by Larry Wall. Although its name is not officially an acronym, it is often backronymed as “Practical Extraction and Report Language” to highlight its original focus on text manipulation and report generation.
Origins and Purpose 🔗
Larry Wall created Perl to make report processing easier on Unix systems, designing it to handle tasks that were difficult with existing tools like sed, awk, and shell scripts. It was built with the philosophy that “easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible”. Because of its immense flexibility in tying together disparate systems and data formats, it earned the nickname “the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages”.
Key Features 🔗
Perl is known for borrowing features from C, shell scripting, AWK, and sed, resulting in a rich and expressive syntax.
- Text Processing: It has powerful built-in text manipulation capabilities, particularly its advanced support for regular expressions, making it ideal for parsing and analyzing large log files or data sets.
- Versatility: It supports multiple programming paradigms, including procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming.
- Loosely Typed: Variables in Perl do not require explicit data type declarations (e.g., integer, string) and the language manages memory automatically.
- Interpretability: Code can run immediately without a separate compilation step, though it is technically compiled to bytecode before execution for performance.
Common Use Cases 🔗
While its popularity has waned compared to languages like Python or JavaScript, Perl remains deeply integrated into legacy systems and specific domains.
| Domain | Application |
|---|---|
| System Administration | Automating tasks, managing user accounts, and processing log files on Unix/Linux systems. |
| Web Development | Historically dominant in CGI scripting; still used for backend processing and web automation. |
| Bioinformatics | Processing genomic data and sequencing information due to its string-handling speed. |
| Network Programming | Creating network clients/servers and managing protocols. |
Current Status 🔗
The most current major version is Perl 5, which has been maintained and updated since 1994. A long-anticipated sister language, formerly known as Perl 6, was renamed Raku in 2019 to distinguish it as a separate technology rather than a direct upgrade. Perl continues to be installed by default on most Unix-like operating systems and retains a dedicated community of developers.
Statistics of perl programming language 🔗
On December 16th 2025, The number of CLI apps written in perl and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae is 27 apps.
You may like to compare it with Python , Ruby , or Go .
Apps written in perl and distributed via Homebrew Core Formulae 🔗
- help2man : Automatically generate simple man pages
- latexdiff : Compare and mark up LaTeX file differences
- latexindent : Add indentation to LaTeX files
- perl-xml-parser : Perl module for parsing XML documents
- apt : Advanced Package Tool
- biber : Backend processor for BibLaTeX
- bioperl : Perl tools for bioinformatics, genomics and life science
- carton : Perl module dependency manager (aka Bundler for Perl)
- texlive : Free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system
- abcde : Better CD Encoder
- cpm : Fast CPAN module installer
- dpkg : Debian package management system
- maxima : Computer algebra system
- notmuch-mutt : Notmuch integration for Mutt
- po4a : Documentation translation maintenance tool
- webkitgtk : GTK interface to WebKit
- abricate : Find antimicrobial resistance and virulence genes in contigs
- asciiquarium : Aquarium animation in ASCII art
- lanraragi : Web application for archival and reading of manga/doujinshi
- latexml : LaTeX to XML/HTML/MathML Converter
- libdbusmenu : GLib and Gtk Implementation of the DBusMenu protocol
- mhonarc : Mail-to-HTML converter
- wakeonlan : Sends magic packets to wake up network-devices
- weechat : Extensible IRC client
- argus-clients : Audit Record Generation and Utilization System clients
- avahi : Service Discovery for Linux using mDNS/DNS-SD
- cpanminus : Get, unpack, build, and install modules from CPAN
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