Perl regex tutes?

Could anyone point me in the direction of some good regex tutorials? If read a few of them, and I'm still totally confounded. I've been told the Perl man page (sp?) is good, but I can't seem to find it.

Thanks all!

The perl documentation is one of those things that you're just "supposed to know" it seems. You know, everyone uses it but no one ever tells you how to use it, because it's understood, you know?

If you're on a unix system, try typing "man perl" or "perldoc perl" to get the online documentation. The perl documentation is extremely thorough, and maybe at times little impenetrable for a newbie. However, you could become a perl hacker just reading the documentation that comes with perl.

The perl regex tutorial that you're looking for ("man perlretut") is extremely good! I should read it again. . .

BTW, on most *nixes, the pager used by "man" is "less" (which is an improved version of "more" (less is more. . . get it?)). If you're confused about how to get around in man pages, read "man less" for tips.

Good luck!

You could also read it online at:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Re.../perlretut.html

Thanks for the pointer to the tutorial, it looks great!

I would still like a look at man pages on regex, but I'm on windows. Any suggestions?

Thanks

If I'm not mistaken, the ActiveState URL I gave you has all the perl man pages online converted to HTML. Poke around! O'Reilly has all the perl man pages online too, I think.

Otherwise, I'm not sure if the default ActiveState Win32 perl has the man pages in some other format. (I stick to *nix as much as possible, and do all my development on linux boxes.) You might try poking around your HDD under the ActiveState directory.

Otherwise, you can always ssh (or telnet) to a *nix box and use the commands I gave you in the previous post.

Hope this helps!

It does, thank you.

While I have you, and you seem to be a stone cold *nix guy, could you give me some suggestions on which version of Linux I might want to try and install to try and start learning it. There's a lot of them out there, and it's very confusing. I would really like to start learning it, but I'm not sure where to start.

Kinda OT, but what the hay.

My suggestion? Linux-Mandrake 8.0. I think it's the best distro to learn with.

The install is really good, the distro has practically EVERYTHING you could want, and it has an excellent "update" feature for security and bug fixes.

Once you figured out *nix a little bit, you'll probably "graduate" to something like RedHat, Slackware or Debian, but for starters I'd go with Linux-Mandrake.

I use Mandrake for all my linux workstations, mainly because it has everything you could want and is easy to administer. If you have a coupla gb free on an HDD, you set Mandrake up to dual boot pretty painlessly.

It's available for free at

http://www.linux-mandrake.com

With a linux box, you can have a full-fledged server, with all the tools you need to hack anything, for free. If you're a web programmer, I don't know why you'd use anything other than linux or bsd. Plus, if you're the type that likes to truly figure things out, linux is infinitely more fun than windows.

Thanks for putting in the OT.

Sorry, didn't mean to push my luck with one too many questions.

I really want to try out Linux, I just have to figure out what program to buy to partition my HD so I can run the duel boot system. I don't want to fdisk, so I'll probably get Partition Magic and give it a shot.

Thanks again for all your help.