On Sun, 10 Jun 2001, Burt Humburg wrote:
> Just installed Perl on a Linux box yesterday and I'm eager to get started...
>
> Is there a shareware/freeware Perl development environment? (As in comments
> are this color, constants are that color, a real-time debugger, etc?)
If you are using Linux, you have several decent code editors already
installed on your machine, like emacs, vim, jed, etc. emacs and vim in
particular are very mature products and can do syntax highlighting. there
may be a bit of a learning curve with them, however.
You can also look into Komodo, which was designed in particular for Perl
and Python, available from ActiveState (www.activestate.com).
> Is there a module/include/header that parses CGI input and sticks it into
> known variables?
Yes, the definitive module is CGI.pm, and comes standard with all newer
Perl versions (Perl5).
> How do I set Perl up to avoid security blunders? (I know there's a way of
> setting up a CGI-bin so that anyone can pass the OS commands as root, but I
> don't know how to avoid it.)
Please see http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/cgi_docs.html and
http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/www-security-faq.html for lots nmore info
on WWW and security (both sites are by Lincoln Stein, who developed
CGI.pm).
> Basically, I guess I need some beginner FAQs or references. Any suggestions
> to my specific problems or those that are more general?
You should also visit www.perl.com.
-- Brett
