1.3 What Next?
Take the files that were delivered to you and put them somewhere they can never be changed. Either make a copy of them on read-only media, or check them into a source code control system—preferably both. In your process of modifying these files there will likely come times when you want to see what they contained before some change you have already made. Putting the files under revision control from the start will be a decision you will come to value immensely. Systems that can do that range from the ubiquitous and free but venerable RCS and SCCS (see, e.g., [BOLINGER95]), through the popular CVS (see for example [VESPERMAN03]), to the latest open source project, Subversion (http://subversion.tigris.org/). Later on I'll show you how to integrate Perl files with those products.
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