Practical Extraction and Reporting Language is an open source server side programming language extensively used for web scripts and to process data passed via the Common Gateway Interface from HTML forms etc. Perl scripts are not embedded within HTML pages and do not download to the web browser but reside on the server. They execute by being triggered from commands within HTML pages or other scripts and may produce HTML output that does download to the web browser.

Perl script can be saved with a .cgi or .pl file extension, and must be uploaded to cgi-bin directory on your server. File permission for Perl script should be set to 755 (Symbolic: rwxr-xr-x).