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

I've created perli, a Perl REPL that runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Its focus is automatic result printing, convenient documentation lookups, and easy inspection of regular-expression matches.
You can see screenshots here.

It works stand-alone (has no dependencies other than Perl itself), but installation of rlwrap is strongly recommended so as to support command-line editing, persistent command history, and tab-completion - read more here.

Installation

• If you happen to have Node.js installed:

  npm install -g perli
  

• Otherwise:

  • Unix-like platforms: Download this script as perli to a folder in your system's path and make it executable with chmod +x.

  • Windows: Download the this script as perli.pl (note the .pl extension) to a folder in your system's path.
    If you don't mind invoking Perli as perli.pl, you're all set.
    Otherwise, create a batch file named perli.cmd in the same folder with the following content: @%~dpn.pl %*; this enables invocation as just perli.

Answer 2

You can always just drop into the built-in debugger and run commands from there.

   perl -d -e 1

Answer 3

Not only did Matt Trout write an article about a REPL, he actually wrote one - Devel::REPL

I've used it a bit and it works fairly well, and it's under active development.

BTW, I have no idea why someone modded down the person who mentioned using "perl -e" from the console. This isn't really a REPL, true, but it's fantastically useful, and I use it all the time.

Answer 4

There isn't an interactive console for Perl built in like Python does. You can however use the Perl Debugger to do debugging related things. You turn it on with the -d option, but you might want to check out 'man perldebug' to learn about it.

After a bit of googling, there is a separate project that implements a Perl console which you can find at http://www.sukria.net/perlconsole.html.

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

Under Debian/Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install libdevel-repl-perl
$ re.pl

$ sudo apt-get install libapp-repl-perl
$ iperl

Answer 6

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>