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User Commands perl(1)
NAME
perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
SYNOPSIS
perl [-sTuU] [-hv] [ -V [ : configvar]] [-cw] [ -d [ :
debugger]] [ -D [number/list]] [-pna] [-F pattern] [ -l
[octal]] [ -0 [octal]] [-I dir] [ -m [-] module] [ -M [-]
'module...'] [-P] [-S] [ -x [dir]] [ -i [extension]] [-
e 'command'] [--] [programfile] [argument...]
DESCRIPTION
For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into
the following sections.
OVERVIEW
perl Perl overview (this section)
perlintro Perl introduction for beginners
perltoc Perl documentation table of contents
TUTORIALS
Tutorials
perlreftut Perl references short introduction
perldsc Perl data structures intro
perllol Perl data structures: arrays of arrays
perlrequick Perl regular expressions quick start
perlretut Perl regular expressions tutorial
perlboot Perl OO tutorial for beginners
perltoot Perl OO tutorial, part 1
perltooc Perl OO tutorial, part 2
perlbot Perl OO tricks and examples
perlstyle Perl style guide
perlcheat Perl cheat sheet
perltrap Perl traps for the unwary
perldebtut Perl debugging tutorial
perlfaq Perl frequently asked questions
perlfaq1 General Questions About Perl
perlfaq2 Obtaining and Learning about Perl
perlfaq3 Programming Tools
perlfaq4 Data Manipulation
perlfaq5 Files and Formats
perlfaq6 Regexes
perlfaq7 Perl Language Issues
perlfaq8 System Interaction
perlfaq9 Networking
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User Commands perl(1)
REFERENCE MANUAL
perlsyn Perl syntax
perldata Perl data structures
perlop Perl operators and precedence
perlsub Perl subroutines
perlfunc Perl built-in functions
perlopentut Perl open() tutorial
perlpacktut Perl pack() and unpack() tutorial
perlpod Perl plain old documentation
perlpodspec Perl plain old documentation format specification
perlrun Perl execution and options
perldiag Perl diagnostic messages
perllexwarn Perl warnings and their control
perldebug Perl debugging
perlvar Perl predefined variables
perlre Perl regular expressions, the rest of the story
perlreref Perl regular expressions quick reference
perlref Perl references, the rest of the story
perlform Perl formats
perlobj Perl objects
perltie Perl objects hidden behind simple variables
perldbmfilter Perl DBM filters
perlipc Perl interprocess communication
perlfork Perl fork() information
perlnumber Perl number semantics
perlthrtut Perl threads tutorial
perlothrtut Old Perl threads tutorial
perlport Perl portability guide
perllocale Perl locale support
perluniintro Perl Unicode introduction
perlunicode Perl Unicode support
perlebcdic Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms
perlsec Perl security
perlmod Perl modules: how they work
perlmodlib Perl modules: how to write and use
perlmodstyle Perl modules: how to write modules with style
perlmodinstall Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
perlnewmod Perl modules: preparing a new module for distribution
perlutil utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
perlcompile Perl compiler suite intro
perlfilter Perl source filters
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User Commands perl(1)
INTERNALS AND C LANGUAGE INTERFACE
perlembed Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
perldebguts Perl debugging guts and tips
perlxstut Perl XS tutorial
perlxs Perl XS application programming interface
perlclib Internal replacements for standard C library functions
perlguts Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
perlcall Perl calling conventions from C
perlapi Perl API listing (autogenerated)
perlintern Perl internal functions (autogenerated)
perliol C API for Perl's implementation of IO in Layers
perlapio Perl internal IO abstraction interface
perlhack Perl hackers guide
MISCELLANEOUS
perlbook Perl book information
perltodo Perl things to do
perldoc Look up Perl documentation in Pod format
perlhist Perl history records
perldelta Perl changes since previous version
perl583delta Perl changes in version 5.8.3
perl582delta Perl changes in version 5.8.2
perl581delta Perl changes in version 5.8.1
perl58delta Perl changes in version 5.8.0
perl573delta Perl changes in version 5.7.3
perl572delta Perl changes in version 5.7.2
perl571delta Perl changes in version 5.7.1
perl570delta Perl changes in version 5.7.0
perl561delta Perl changes in version 5.6.1
perl56delta Perl changes in version 5.6
perl5005delta Perl changes in version 5.005
perl5004delta Perl changes in version 5.004
perlartistic Perl Artistic License
perlgpl GNU General Public License
LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC
perlcn Perl for Simplified Chinese (in EUC-CN)
perljp Perl for Japanese (in EUC-JP)
perlko Perl for Korean (in EUC-KR)
perltw Perl for Traditional Chinese (in Big5)
PLATFORM-SPECIFIC
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User Commands perl(1)
perlsolaris Perl notes for Solaris
Platform-Specific
If you're new to Perl, you should start with perlintro,
which is a general intro for beginners and provides some
background to help you navigate the rest of Perl's extensive
documentation. For ease of access, the Perl manual has been
split up into several sections.
The manpages listed above are installed in the
/usr/perl5/man/ directory.
Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is
available. This additional documentation is in the
/usr/perl5/man directory. Some of this additional documenta-
tion is distributed standard with Perl, but you'll also find
documentation for any customer-installed third-party modules
there.
You can view Perl's documentation with man(1) by including
/usr/perl5/man in the MANPATH environment variable. Notice
that running catman(1M) on the Perl manual pages is not sup-
ported. For other Solaris-specific details, see the NOTES
section below.
You can also use the supplied /usr/perl5/bin/perldoc script
to view Perl information.
If something strange has gone wrong with your program and
you're not sure where you should look for help, try the -w
switch first. It will often point out exactly where the
trouble is.
Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
files, extracting information from those text files, and
printing reports based on that information. It's also a
good language for many system management tasks. The
language is intended to be practical (easy to use, effi-
cient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant,
minimal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the
best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar
with those languages should have little difficulty with it.
(Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh,
Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds
closely to C expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities,
Perl does not arbitrarily limit the size of your data -if
you've got the memory, Perl can slurp in your whole file as
a single string. Recursion is of unlimited depth. And the
tables used by hashes (sometimes called "associative
arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance.
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User Commands perl(1)
Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to
scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for
scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can
make dbm files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are
safer than C programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism
that prevents many stupid security holes.
If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk
or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a lit-
tle faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing in
C, then Perl may be for you. There are also translators to
turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.
But wait, there's more...
Begun in 1993 (see perlhist), Perl version 5 is nearly a
complete rewrite that provides the following additional
benefits:
o Modularity and reusability using innumerable modules
Described in perlmod, perlmodlib, and perlmodinstall.
o Embeddable and extensible Described in perlembed,
perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, and xsubpp.
o Roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple
simultaneous DBM implementations). Described in perltie
and AnyDBM_File.
o Subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and pro-
totyped. Described in perlsub.
o Arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous func-
tions. Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and
perllol.
o Object-oriented programming. Described in perlobj,
perlboot, perltoot, perltooc, and perlbot.
o Support for light-weight processes (threads). Described
in perlthrtut and threads.
o Support for Unicode, internationalization, and locali-
zation Described in perluniintro, perllocale and
Locale::Maketext.
o Lexical scoping. Described in perlsub.
o Regular expression enhancements. Described in perlre,
with additional examples in perlop.
o
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User Commands perl(1)
Enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment,
with integrated editor support. Described in perldeb-
tut, perldebug and perldebguts.
o POSIX 1003.1 compliant library Described in POSIX.
Okay, that's definitely enough hype.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
The Perl shipped with Solaris is installed under /usr/perl5
rather than the default /usr/local location. This is so that
it can coexist with a customer-installed Perl in the default
/usr/local location.
Any additional modules that you choose to install will be
placed in the /usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4 directory. The
/usr/perl5/vendor_perl directory is reserved for SMI-
provided modules.
Notice that the Perl utility scripts such as perldoc and
perlbug are in the /usr/perl5/bin directory, so if you wish
to use them you need to include /usr/perl5/bin in your PATH
environment variable.
See also the perlrun mapage.
AUTHOR
Larry Wall, with the help of oodles of other folks.
If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of help
to others who wish to advocate the use of Perl in their
applications, or if you wish to simply express your grati-
tude to Larry and the Perl developers, please write to
perl-thanks@perl.org .
FILES
"@INC" Locations of Perl libraries
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attri-
butes:
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User Commands perl(1)
____________________________________________________________
| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |
| ____________________________|_____________________________|_
| Availability | SUNWperl584core, |
| | SUNWperl584usr, |
| | SUNWperl584man, SUNWpl5u,|
| | SUNWpl5v SUNWpl5p, SUNWpl5m|
| | |
| | See below. |
|_____________________________|_____________________________|
| Interface Stability | See below. |
|_____________________________|_____________________________|
Perl is available for most operating systems, including vir-
tually all Unix-like platforms. See "Supported Platforms"
in perlport for a listing.
The Script interface is Evolving. The XSUB interface is
Evolving. The Binary interface is Unstable. The Directory
layout is Evolving.
SEE ALSO
a2p awk to perl translator
s2p sed to perl translator
http://www.perl.com Perl home page
http://www.perl.com/CPAN The Comprehensive Perl
Archive
http://www.perl.org Perl Mongers (Perl user
groups)
DIAGNOSTICS
The `use warnings' pragma (and the -w switch) produce some
lovely diagnostics.
See perldiag for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics.
The `use diagnostics' pragma automatically turns Perl's nor-
mally terse warnings and errors into these longer forms.
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User Commands perl(1)
Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the
error, with an indication of the next token or token type
that was to be examined. (In a script passed to Perl via -e
switches, each -e is counted as one line.)
Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce
error messages such as "Insecure dependency". See perlsec.
Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the
-w switch?
NOTES
Perl 5.8.4 has been built to be largefile-aware and to use
64-bit integers, although the interpreter itself is a 32-bit
application (LP32). To view detailed configuration informa-
tion, use perl -V and perlbug -dv.
If you wish to build and install add-on modules from CPAN
using gcc, you can do so using the
/usr/perl5/5.8.4/bin/perlgcc script - see perlgcc(1) for
details.
If you wish to build and install your own version of Perl,
you should NOT remove the 5.8.4 version of perl under
/usr/perl5, as it is required by several system utilities.
The Perl package names are as follows:
SUNWperl584core Perl 5.8.4 (Core files)
SUNWperl584usr Perl 5.8.4 (Non-core files)
SUNWperl584man Perl 5.8.4 (Manual pages)
Solaris 10 also ships with the 5.6.1 version of Perl that
was included in Solaris 9. If you are upgrading your system
and wish to continue to use Perl 5.6.1 as the default Perl
version you should refer to the perlsolaris manpage for
details of how to do this. Note that you should upgrade
your installation to use Perl 5.8.4 as soon as is practica-
ble, as Perl 5.6.1 may be removed in a future release.
The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it."
Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the reader.
The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.
BUGS
The -w switch is not mandatory.
Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of vari-
ous operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-
point output with sprintf().
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User Commands perl(1)
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and
writes on a particular stream, so does Perl. (This doesn't
apply to sysread() and syswrite().)
While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary
size limits (apart from memory size), there are still a few
arbitrary limits: a given variable name may not be longer
than 251 characters. Line numbers displayed by diagnostics
are internally stored as short integers, so they are limited
to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being affected
by wraparound).
You may mail your bug reports (be sure to include full con-
figuration information as output by the myconfig program in
the perl source tree, or by `perl -V') to perlbug@perl.org .
If you've succeeded in compiling perl, the perlbug script in
the utils/ subdirectory can be used to help mail in a bug
report.
Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish
Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that.
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© 1994 Man-cgi 1.15, Panagiotis Christias <christia@theseas.ntua.gr>