Print a string

Strings in perl are either inside single-quotes ('') or double-quotes ("").

perl -E "say 'hello world'"

As in most other programming languages if you would like to use a quote character inside a string you will need to escape it by putting a backslash \ in front of it.

perl -e "print 'hello \'nice\' world'"

This is doubly true for oneliners as the whole perl expression is also inside some kind of quotes.

$ perl -E "say 'hello \"nice\" world'"
hello "nice" world

However, perl allows you to use q() instead of single-quote and qq() instead of double quotes. That means we can rewrite the earlier example using either of them

perl -E "say q(hello 'nice' world)"
hello 'nice' world

$ perl -E "say qq(hello 'nice' world)"
hello 'nice' world

The difference betweem single- and doble-quotes is that in double-quotes variables are interpolated. We’ll see that in later examples. In our current examples that did not matter.