Practical Perl Tools: Perl without Perl

I travel a great deal these days for my work, so it isn’t uncommon for me to find myself on an airplane hoping to get some work done with only dribbles of WiFi. In those cases, you often have to make do with whatever is already on your laptop. I thought it might be interesting to explore what sort of goodies you might have available under those conditions from a stock Perl installation. To make this column extra realistic, let me report that as I write this I am flying at 34,153 ft at a speed of 437 mph over Lake Ontario (honest truth). Right before I left for the airport, I used perlbrew to install a stock version of the stable version of Perl (5.24.1) on my laptop. Let’s switch to it and start our exploration: