Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A Question for the Audience

I’ve come across “.perl” files twice in the last couple of months, both times on U.S. Government sites where there used to be .pdf files to be downloaded. Nothing that I’ve got, that I know of, will open them. Google sends me to sites that talk about Perl as a programming language.

Anybody know the particular way I’m stupid this time around?

3 comments:

Posol'stvo the Medved said...

If you were to point me to an example, I could assess, but if they are genuinely PERL files, then a simple text editor would work. I don't know that you would see anything of value to you in there though.

Chances are, those files are supposed to be executed on the server and display a result, but the servers are not processing them correctly.

Geez, I think the last time I used Perl was about 9 years ago.

Dave said...

That makes sense Pos. I did "open" them with Texteditor which resulted in a bunch of squiggles.

You appear to be saying that the government site hadn't processed them into .pdf files, which is what they were labeled to be.

I'm not fully stupid!

Posol'stvo the Medved said...

If you saw squigglies, than it may be that those ARE PDFs with the wrong extension.

You could try downloading them and then forcing them to open in Acrobat.

I know that on a PC, all you have to do is change the extension to really screw things up. Again. Point me to an example?

Also, you'll note that I am staying out of the Glenn Beck discussion, since I've never listened to him, but your friend J is starting to rub me the wrong way.