PERLPLAN9(1)     Perl Programmers Reference Guide    PERLPLAN9(1)



NAME
       perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl

DESCRIPTION
       These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan
       9 Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a replacement
       for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both
       copious and excellent). If you have any questions to which
       you can't find answers in these man pages, contact Luther
       Huffman at lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer
       them.

       Invoking Perl

       Perl is invoked from the command line as described in
       perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first line
       such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a she-
       bang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS shell where
       to find the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this state-
       ment should be "#!/bin/perl" if you wish to be able to
       directly invoke the script by its name.
            Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command
       "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce Acme-friendly
       error messages of the form "filename:18".

       Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension,
       are self-configuring and are able to correctly create
       their own shebang path from config information located in
       Plan 9 Perl. These you won't need to be worried about.

       What's in Plan 9 Perl

       Although Plan 9 Perl currently only  provides static load-
       ing, it is built with a number of useful extensions.
       These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect
       to see others (and DynaLoading!) in the future.

       What's not in Plan 9 Perl

       As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently
       available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-priority items.

       Perl5 Functions not currently supported in Plan 9 Perl

       Some, such as "chown" and "umask" aren't provided because
       the concept does not exist within Plan 9. Others, such as
       some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been
       written yet. Many in the latter category may be supported
       in the future.

       The functions not currently implemented include:

           chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
           setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
           getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
           sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
           endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

       There may be several other functions that have undefined
       behavior so this list shouldn't be considered complete.



       Signals in Plan 9 Perl

       For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix
       environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal emulation
       provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal
       stacking isn't supported. The signals provided are:

           SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
           SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
           SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
           SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

COMPILING AND INSTALLING PERL ON PLAN 9
       WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul!

          This is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. Still to be
       implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. Many perl commands are
       missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. These gaps will,
       with perseverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near
       future.To install this software:

       1. Create the source directories and libraries for perl by
       running the plan9/setup.rc command (i.e., located in the
       plan9 subdirectory).  Note: the setup routine assumes that
       you haven't dearchived these files into /sys/src/cmd/perl.
       After running setup.rc you may delete the copy of the
       source you originally detarred, as source code has now
       been installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. If you plan on
       installing perl binaries for all architectures, run
       "setup.rc -a".

       2. After making sure that you have adequate privileges to
       build system software, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301
       (adjust version appropriately) run:

               mk install

       If you wish to install perl versions for all architectures
       (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run:

               mk installall

       3. Wait. The build process will take a *long* time because
       perl bootstraps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM machine
       takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from
       scratch.

       Installing Perl Documentation on Plan 9

       This perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of
       documentation. To add these to the built-in manuals that
       come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust
       version appropriately) run:

               mk man

       To begin your reading, start with:

               man perl

       This is a good introduction and will direct you towards
       other man pages that may interest you.

       (Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear
       not.)

BUGS
       "As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of
       the world . . ." - Carl Sagan

Revision date
       This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl
       5.003_7.

AUTHOR
       Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report
       (ahem) direct comments toward:

       Luther Huffman, lutherh@stratcom.com, Strategic Computer
       Solutions, Inc.



perl v5.8.8                 2006-01-07               PERLPLAN9(1)