How can I start an interactive console for Perl?

Question

How can I start an interactive console for Perl, similar to the irb command for Ruby or python for Python?

Answer 1

If you want history, use rlwrap. This could be your ~/bin/ips for example:

#!/bin/sh
echo 'This is Interactive Perl shell'
rlwrap -A -pgreen -S"perl> " perl -wnE'say eval()//$@'

And this is how it looks like:

$ ips
This is Interactive Perl shell
perl> 2**128
3.40282366920938e+38
perl>