Installing Perl on your Windows System

Once you have downloaded the appropriate perl distribution for your system, you must compile and/or install it on your system. The procedure for installing perl on non-Unix systems (called foreign ports by the Perl community) is going to be very different from the procedure for installing perl on Unix systems.
The best source for instructions will be the documentation that came with your perl distribution. You can typically find precompiled binaries for most major platforms; however perl is often distributed as C source code and must be compiled before it can be installed on your system. This is not a particularly difficult process; in fact it is usually automated.

To summarize Perl completely and succinctly, we probably cannot do much better than this excerpt from the original Unix help file:
Perl is (an) interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It is also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC|PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax. If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster, and you do not want to write the silly thing in C, then perl may be for you. There are also translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into perl scripts. OK, enough hype.

If you can not find a precompiled binary for your system or you want the experience of compiling the source code yourself, you will need a C compiler on your system. If you do not have one, you may be able to find a version of gcc (an excellent C compiler) that works on your system by checking this ftp site.

Click your operating system's name below for platform-specific installation guidelines:

1. Unix
2. Win32

Once you have downloaded and saved to your desktop the MacPerl port for the Macintosh, installation is simple.

Unzip the downloaded file with StuffIt Expander or a similar decompression utility.

Double-click the installer.
This will prompt you to select the installation package appropriate for your Macintosh system. Then, select a destination folder for the application and associated files, and click Install.

MacPerl should now be installed on your system.
Take some time to read over the readme file and while you are at now is the time to closely examine all of the benefits associated with visiting the MACMALL.