Ok, so irb is totally great for testing out some syntax and general sanity checking, but we don’t really have that with perl…or do we?

I am sure that all of the real perl hackers out there know this, but the best perl shell is your real shell. If I wanna do some cool stuff with perl I can do a lot of it directly from my shell with -e (I recommend -E as you can use ‘say’, which is helpful so that you can avoid quote issues.)

Anyway, since my brain has been so affected by ruby functional programming I have been doing a lot of:

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perl -Mautobox::Core -E '@f = (<*.foo>); @f->foreach(sub { ... })'

So I am making an alias like this:

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alias ipl='perl -Mautobox::Core -E'

Every little keystroke matters in such a case :-)

Anyway, hope this helps at least remind you of the power you already have.