Perl is a popular programming language that has over the years proven itself as an extremely useful tool for scripting for example for administration and text analysis and cleaning tasks. Perl was first developed by Larry Wall. One of its greatest strengths is its powerful implementation of regular expressions that is a quasi standard.

Learn more about Perl at https://www.perl.org/

• UNIX / Linux: users of these operating systems typically need not worry about installing Perl as UNIX-like operating systems come with Perl pre-installed; users might just want to check the version of Perl installed on their system if they have special requirements concerning the version
• Mac OS: as Mac OS is a UNIX-like operating system Perl is pre-installed, see above
• Windows: Windows does not ship with Perl pre-installed, but Perl is freely available and the installation simply requires downloading a single file and executing it. Alternatively, Strawberry Perl is a freely available distribution that is widely recommended for Windows in the community. Just download the current installation file for your operating system, run the executable file and you are set.