Day 1 – Porting Vigilance, integrating Perl 6 with standard tools

Greetings everyone, today we’ll be taking an infrastructural script and port it from Perl 5 to Perl 6. This article is based on a pair of posts by James Clark, which you can find here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

This script is used to create and verify MD5 sums. These are 128-bit values that can be used to verify data integrity. While MD5 has been proven to be insecure in protecting against malicious actors, it is still useful for detecting on-disk corruption.

The Perl 6 ecosystem is growing and contains a variety of tools that are either ported from the Perl 5 CPAN, or are replacements. I’ll walk through a few aspects of the original script and my port and show why I make some specific changes. Hopefully this will encourage you to go out and port your own little scripts.