Question

I’m following a bioinformatics text, and this represents one of my first Perl scripts. While in TextMate, this does not produce any result. Is it functioning? I added “hello world” at the bottom and I don’t see that when I run the script in TextMate. What have I done wrong?

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
use lib "/Users/fogonthedowns/myperllib";
use LWP::Simple;
use strict;

#Set base URL for all eutils
my $utils = "http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils";
my $db = "Pubmed";
my $query ="Cancer+Prostate";
my $retmax = 10;
my $esearch = "$utils/esearch.fcgi?" . 
              "db=$db&retmax=$retmax&term=";

my $esearch_result = get($esearch.$query);
print "ESEARCH RESULT: $esearch_result\n";
print "Using Query: \n$esearch$query\n";
print "hello world\n";

Answer 1

Have you run other scripts successfully in TextMate? I suspect that you have an editor configuration issue (or that URL is not hittable and the script is generating an error).

Try running an even simpler script and see what happens, e.g. something like:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
print "hello world\n";

Next, see if you can see error output:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
warn "oh noes";