One of the things that makes perl so powerful and fascinating is the huge number of modules that are available online, especially through the CPAN repository. Today I stumbled upon one called Finance::Quote, which does one thing, very simply: it retrieves stock (or mutual fund) quotes. You feed it a ticker symbol and it gives back a hash with all sorts of information, but most importantly, the price. I’m going to show how to use this to create a command line tool that will grab an up-to-the minute stock quote for any ticker symbol you give it.

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