perlplan9
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,
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:
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 v5.8.1 2003-09-02 PERLPLAN9(1)
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