You may think a developers initiation is mastering arrays, creating a github repo or that awful feeling when you have just taken down a site. All of the above are important moments in a web developers career (wether good or bad!) but in my mind, it comes down to Perl.
Perl is a beautiful language but it has quite a high entry level. A developer can play around with php loops and mysql rows all they like, but you know you’re getting somewhere when you see the brilliance and power of Perl.
It’s not my first language of choice, I see there being a solid 5-6 years left in PHP on the web and I don’t think Perl will be it’s progenitor, but there is something about creating a Perl script. 10 lines of code to do what takes PHP 25. Great REGEX support and the simplicity of DBI not to mention the lack of quotation marks!
But the syntax and features are not what I want to talk about today. I just wanted to make sure you were aware of something within WHM. The ‘Check/Repair a Perl Script‘ tool under the ‘Software‘ menu.
If you are adopting some Perl script or a CGI site, and its not working, it could be because your script is attempting to access a module which is not currently installed. Just enter the path in the field of the script, it will then check for what modules that file is trying to access and if not present on the server it will install them. Boom. No SSH, no CPAN (directly) and no scary moments!
Tip
You may need to run it a few times as it only installs one module per run. Just keep on doing it until it says the script is fine.