Summary

Someday, Perl will be a seamless cross-platform language in which you can write a script to do just about anything, and it will work on any platform with a Perl environment. That day isn't here yet. And some would argue that the goal of total cross-platform compatibility isn't all that great an idea when there are so many differences between platforms and so many cool platform-specific things to play with.

Today, we stopped looking at Perl as a language that works exactly the same across platforms and explored a few of the differences, including environment variables, running programs, and forking processes on Unix, and creating and working with processes and the Registry on Windows. Along the way, I pointed out differences between the ports and other dark corners of each port to explore.