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Before you start, you should glance through the README file found in the top-level directory to which the Perl distribution was extracted. Make sure you read and under stand the terms under which this software is being dis tributed. Also make sure you read "BUGS AND CAVEATS" below for the known limitations of this port. The INSTALL file in the perl top-level has much informa tion that is only relevant to people building Perl on Unix-like systems. In particular, you can safely ignore any information that talks about "Configure". You may also want to look at two other options for build ing a perl that will work on Windows NT: the README.cyg win and README.os2 files, each of which give a different set of rules to build a Perl that will work on Win32 plat forms. Those two methods will probably enable you to build a more Unix-compatible perl, but you will also need to download and use various other build-time and run-time support software described in those files. This set of instructions is meant to describe a so-called "native" port of Perl to Win32 platforms. This includes both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. The resulting Perl requires no additional software to run (other than what came with your operating system). Cur rently, this port is capable of using one of the following compilers on the Intel x86 architecture: Borland C++ version 5.02 or later Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.2 or later Mingw32 with GCC version 2.95.2 or better The last of these is a high quality freeware compiler. Support for it is still experimental. (Older versions of GCC are known not to work.) This port can also be built on the Intel IA64 using: Microsoft Platform SDK Nov 2001 (64-bit compiler and tools) The MS Platform SDK can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/. This port fully supports MakeMaker (the set of modules under Windows NT/2000/XP, nmake will work. All other builds need dmake. dmake is a freely available make that has very nice macro features and parallelability. A port of dmake for Windows is available from: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/dmake-4.1pl1-win32.zip (This is a fixed version of the original dmake sources obtained from http://www.wticorp.com/ As of version 4.1PL1, the original sources did not build as shipped and had various other problems. A patch is included in the above fixed version.) Fetch and install dmake somewhere on your path (follow the instructions in the README.NOW file). There exists a minor coexistence problem with dmake and Borland C++ compilers. Namely, if a distribution has C files named with mixed case letters, they will be compiled into appropriate .obj-files named with all lowercase letters, and every time dmake is invoked to bring files up to date, it will try to recompile such files again. For example, Tk distribution has a lot of such files, resulting in needless recompiles every time dmake is invoked. To avoid this, you may use the script "sync_ext.pl" after a successful build. It is available in the win32 subdirectory of the Perl source distribution. Command Shell Use the default "cmd" shell that comes with NT. Some versions of the popular 4DOS/NT shell have incompati bilities that may cause you trouble. If the build fails under that shell, try building again with the cmd shell. The nmake Makefile also has known incompatibilities with the "command.com" shell that comes with Windows 9x. You will need to use dmake and makefile.mk to build under Windows 9x. The surest way to build it is on Windows NT/2000/XP, using the cmd shell. Make sure the path to the build directory does not contain spaces. The build usually works in this cir cumstance, but some tests will fail. Borland C++ whatever the directory name under which the Visual C dmake configuration lives) in your environment and edit win32/config.vc to change "make=nmake" into "make=dmake". The latter step is only essential if you want to use dmake as your default make for build ing extensions using MakeMaker. Microsoft Platform SDK 64-bit Compiler The nmake that comes with the Platform SDK will suf fice for building Perl. Make sure you are building within one of the "Build Environment" shells available after you install the Platform SDK from the Start Menu. MinGW32 with gcc The latest release of MinGW (at the time of writing) is 2.0.0, which comes with gcc-3.2, and can be down loaded here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw Perl compiles with earlier releases of gcc (2.95 and up) that can be downloaded from the same place. If you use gcc-3.2, comment out the line: USE_GCC_V3_2 *= define in win32\makefile.mk You also need dmake. See "Make" above on how to get it. MinGW release 1 The MinGW-1.1 bundle comes with gcc-2.95.3. Make sure you install the binaries that work with MSVCRT.DLL as indicated in the README for the GCC bun dle. You may need to set up a few environment vari ables (usually ran from a batch file). There are a couple of problems with the version of gcc-2.95.2-msvcrt.exe released 7 November 1999: * It left out a fix for certain command line quotes. To fix this, be sure to download and install the file fixes/quote-fix-msvcrt.exe from the above ftp location. * The definition of the fpos_t type in stdio.h may be wrong. If your stdio.h has this problem, you will see an exception when running the test t/lib/io_xs.t. To fix this, change the typedef the perl toplevel. This directory contains a "Make file" that will work with versions of nmake that come with Visual C++ or the Platform SDK, and a dmake "makefile.mk" that will work for all supported compil ers. The defaults in the dmake makefile are setup to build using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 or newer. · Edit the makefile.mk (or Makefile, if you're using nmake) and change the values of INST_DRV and INST_TOP. You can also enable various build flags. These are explained in the makefiles. You will have to make sure that CCTYPE is set cor rectly and that CCHOME points to wherever you installed your compiler. The default value for CCHOME in the makefiles for Visual C++ may not be correct for some versions. Make sure the default exists and is valid. If you have either the source or a library that con tains des_fcrypt(), enable the appropriate option in the makefile. A ready-to-use version of fcrypt.c, based on the version originally written by Eric Young at ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/crypt/mirrors/dsi/libdes/, is bundled with the distribution. Set CRYPT_SRC to fcrypt.c to use this version. Alternatively, if you have built a library that contains des_fcrypt(), you can set CRYPT_LIB to point to the library name. Perl will also build without des_fcrypt(), but the crypt() builtin will fail at run time. Be sure to read the instructions near the top of the makefiles carefully. · Type "dmake" (or "nmake" if you are using that make). This should build everything. Specifically, it will create perl.exe, perl58.dll at the perl toplevel, and various other extension dll's under the lib\auto directory. If the build fails for any reason, make sure you have done the previous steps correctly. Testing Perl on Win32 Type "dmake test" (or "nmake test"). This will run most of the tests from the testsuite (many tests will be skipped). There should be no test failures when running under Win dows NT/2000/XP. Many tests will fail under Windows 9x due to the inferior command shell. directory (usually somewhere like C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32) and rerun the test. If you're using Borland compiler versions 5.2 and below, you may run into problems finding the correct header files when building extensions. For example, building the "Tk" extension may fail because both perl and Tk contain a header file called "patchlevel.h". The latest Borland compiler (v5.5) is free of this misbehaviour, and it even supports an option -VI- for backward (bugward) compatibil ity for using the old Borland search algorithm to locate header files. If you run the tests on a FAT partition, you may see some failures for "link()" related tests: Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail Failed List ../ext/IO/lib/IO/t/io_dup.t 6 4 66.67% 2-5 ../lib/File/Temp/t/mktemp.t 9 1 11.11% 2 ../lib/File/Temp/t/posix.t 7 1 14.29% 3 ../lib/File/Temp/t/security.t 13 1 7.69% 2 ../lib/File/Temp/t/tempfile.t 20 2 10.00% 2 4 comp/multiline.t 6 2 33.33% 5-6 io/dup.t 8 6 75.00% 2-7 op/write.t 47 7 14.89% 1-3 6 9-11 Testing on NTFS avoids these errors. Furthermore, you should make sure that during "make test" you do not have any GNU tool packages in your path: some toolkits like Unixutils include some tools ("type" for instance) which override the Windows ones and makes tests fail. Remove them from your path while testing to avoid these errors. Please report any other failures as described under "BUGS AND CAVEATS". Installation of Perl on Win32 Type "dmake install" (or "nmake install"). This will put the newly built perl and the libraries under whatever "INST_TOP" points to in the Makefile. It will also install the pod documentation under "$INST_TOP\$VER SION\lib\pod" and HTML versions of the same under "$INST_TOP\$VERSION\lib\pod\html". To use the Perl you just installed, you will need to add two components to your PATH environment variable, "$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin" and "$INST_TOP\$VERSION\bin\$ARCHNAME". For example: set PATH c:\perl\5.6.0\bin;c:\perl\5.6.0\bin\MSWin32-x86;%PATH% thing additional to start using that perl (except add its location to your PATH variable). If you put extensions in unusual places, you can set PERL5LIB to a list of paths separated by semicolons where you want perl to look for libraries. Look for descriptions of other environment variables you can set in perlrun. You can also control the shell that perl uses to run system() and backtick commands via PERL5SHELL. See perlrun. Perl does not depend on the registry, but it can look up certain default values if you choose to put them there. Perl attempts to read entries from "HKEY_CUR RENT_USER\Software\Perl" and "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Soft ware\Perl". Entries in the former override entries in the latter. One or more of the following entries (of type REG_SZ or REG_EXPAND_SZ) may be set: lib-$] version-specific standard library path to add to @INC lib standard library path to add to @INC sitelib-$] version-specific site library path to add to @INC sitelib site library path to add to @INC vendorlib-$] version-specific vendor library path to add to @INC vendorlib vendor library path to add to @INC PERL* fallback for all %ENV lookups that begin with "PERL" Note the $] in the above is not literal. Substitute whatever version of perl you want to honor that entry, e.g. 5.6.0. Paths must be separated with semicolons, as usual on win32. File Globbing By default, perl handles file globbing using the File::Glob extension, which provides portable glob bing. If you want perl to use globbing that emulates the quirks of DOS filename conventions, you might want to consider using File::DosGlob to override the internal glob() implementation. See File::DosGlob for details. Using perl from the command line If you are accustomed to using perl from various com mand-line shells found in UNIX environments, you will be less than pleased with what Windows offers by way of a command shell. The crucial thing to understand about the Windows environment is that the command line you type in is you are using a non-standard shell, be inconsistent). The only (useful) quote character is the double quote ("). It can be used to protect spaces and other spe cial characters in arguments. The Windows NT documentation has almost no description of how the quoting rules are implemented, but here are some general observations based on experiments: The C runtime breaks arguments at spaces and passes them to programs in argc/argv. Double quotes can be used to prevent arguments with spaces in them from being split up. You can put a double quote in an argument by escaping it with a backslash and enclosing the whole argument within double quotes. The backslash and the pair of double quotes surrounding the argument will be stripped by the C runtime. The file redirection characters "<", ">", and "|" can be quoted by double quotes (although there are sugges tions that this may not always be true). Single quotes are not treated as quotes by the shell or the C runtime, they don't get stripped by the shell (just to make this type of quoting completely useless). The caret "^" has also been observed to behave as a quot ing character, but this appears to be a shell feature, and the caret is not stripped from the command line, so Perl still sees it (and the C runtime phase does not treat the caret as a quote character). Here are some examples of usage of the "cmd" shell: This prints two doublequotes: perl -e "print '\"\"' " This does the same: perl -e "print \"\\\"\\\"\" " This prints "bar" and writes "foo" to the file "blurch": perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" > blurch This prints "foo" ("bar" disappears into nowhereland): perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 2> nul This prints "bar" and writes "foo" into the file "blurch": perl -e "print 'foo'; print STDERR 'bar'" 1> blurch Discovering the usefulness of the "command.com" shell on Windows 9x is left as an exercise to the reader :) One particularly pernicious problem with the 4NT com mand shell for Windows NT is that it (nearly) always treats a % character as indicating that environment variable expansion is needed. Under this shell, it is therefore important to always double any % characters which you want Perl to see (for example, for hash variables), even when they are quoted. Building Extensions The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) offers a wealth of extensions, some of which require a C com piler to build. Look in http://www.cpan.org/ for more information on CPAN. Note that not all of the extensions available from CPAN may work in the Win32 environment; you should check the information at http://testers.cpan.org/ before investing too much effort into porting modules that don't readily build. Most extensions (whether they require a C compiler or not) can be built, tested and installed with the stan dard mantra: perl Makefile.PL $MAKE $MAKE test $MAKE install where $MAKE is whatever 'make' program you have con figured perl to use. Use "perl -V:make" to find out what this is. Some extensions may not provide a test suite (so "$MAKE test" may not do anything or fail), but most serious ones do. It is important that you use a supported 'make' pro gram, and ensure Config.pm knows about it. If you don't have nmake, you can either get dmake from the location mentioned earlier or get an old version of nmake reportedly available from: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/nmake15.exe Another option is to use the make written in Perl, available from CPAN. http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Make/ to use, edit Config.pm to fix it. If a module implements XSUBs, you will need one of the supported C compilers. You must make sure you have set up the environment for the compiler for command- line compilation. If a module does not build for some reason, look care fully for why it failed, and report problems to the module author. If it looks like the extension build ing support is at fault, report that with full details of how the build failed using the perlbug utility. Command-line Wildcard Expansion The default command shells on DOS descendant operating systems (such as they are) usually do not expand wild card arguments supplied to programs. They consider it the application's job to handle that. This is com monly achieved by linking the application (in our case, perl) with startup code that the C runtime libraries usually provide. However, doing that results in incompatible perl versions (since the behavior of the argv expansion code differs depending on the compiler, and it is even buggy on some compil ers). Besides, it may be a source of frustration if you use such a perl binary with an alternate shell that *does* expand wildcards. Instead, the following solution works rather well. The nice things about it are 1) you can start using it right away; 2) it is more powerful, because it will do the right thing with a pattern like */*/*.c; 3) you can decide whether you do/don't want to use it; and 4) you can extend the method to add any customizations (or even entirely different kinds of wildcard expan sion). C:\> copy con c:\perl\lib\Wild.pm # Wild.pm - emulate shell @ARGV expansion on shells that don't use File::DosGlob; @ARGV = map { my @g = File::DosGlob::glob($_) if /[*?]/; @g ? @g : $_; } @ARGV; 1; ^Z C:\> set PERL5OPT=-MWild C:\> perl -le "for (@ARGV) { print }" */*/perl*.c p4view/perl/perl.c p4view/perl/perlio.c p4view/perl/perly.c perl5.005/win32/perlglob.c the C runtime's command line wildcard expansion built into perl binary. The resulting binary will always expand unquoted command lines, which may not be what you want if you use a shell that does that for you. The expansion done is also somewhat less powerful than the approach suggested above. Win32 Specific Extensions A number of extensions specific to the Win32 platform are available from CPAN. You may find that many of these extensions are meant to be used under the Activeware port of Perl, which used to be the only native port for the Win32 platform. Since the Active ware port does not have adequate support for Perl's extension building tools, these extensions typically do not support those tools either and, therefore, can not be built using the generic steps shown in the pre vious section. To ensure smooth transitioning of existing code that uses the ActiveState port, there is a bundle of Win32 extensions that contains all of the ActiveState exten sions and most other Win32 extensions from CPAN in source form, along with many added bugfixes, and with MakeMaker support. This bundle is available at: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GSAR/libwin32-0.18.zip See the README in that distribution for building and installation instructions. Look for later versions that may be available at the same location. Notes on 64-bit Windows Windows .NET Server supports the LLP64 data model on the Intel Itanium architecture. The LLP64 data model is different from the LP64 data model that is the norm on 64-bit Unix platforms. In the former, "int" and "long" are both 32-bit data types, while pointers are 64 bits wide. In addition, there is a separate 64-bit wide integral type, "__int64". In contrast, the LP64 data model that is pervasive on Unix platforms provides "int" as the 32-bit type, while both the "long" type and pointers are of 64-bit precision. Note that both models pro vide for 64-bits of addressability. 64-bit Windows running on Itanium is capable of run ning 32-bit x86 binaries transparently. This means that you could use a 32-bit build of Perl on a 64-bit system. Given this, why would one want to build a 64-bit build of Perl? Here are some reasons why you Perl scripts on UNIX use the "#!" (a.k.a "shebang") line to indicate to the OS that it should execute the file using perl. Win32 has no comparable means to indicate arbitrary files are executables. Instead, all available methods to execute plain text files on Win32 rely on the file "extension". There are three methods to use this to execute perl scripts: 1 There is a facility called "file extension associ ations" that will work in Windows NT 4.0. This can be manipulated via the two commands "assoc" and "ftype" that come standard with Windows NT 4.0. Type "ftype /?" for a complete example of how to set this up for perl scripts (Say what? You thought Windows NT wasn't perl-ready? :). 2 Since file associations don't work everywhere, and there are reportedly bugs with file associations where it does work, the old method of wrapping the perl script to make it look like a regular batch file to the OS, may be used. The install process makes available the "pl2bat.bat" script which can be used to wrap perl scripts into batch files. For example: pl2bat foo.pl will create the file "FOO.BAT". Note "pl2bat" strips any .pl suffix and adds a .bat suffix to the generated file. If you use the 4DOS/NT or similar command shell, note that "pl2bat" uses the "%*" variable in the generated batch file to refer to all the command line arguments, so you may need to make sure that construct works in batch files. As of this writ ing, 4DOS/NT users will need a "ParameterChar = *" statement in their 4NT.INI file or will need to execute "setdos /p*" in the 4DOS/NT startup file to enable this to work. 3 Using "pl2bat" has a few problems: the file name gets changed, so scripts that rely on $0 to find what they must do may not run properly; running "pl2bat" replicates the contents of the original script, and so this process can be maintenance intensive if the originals get updated often. A different approach that avoids both problems is possible. A script called "runperl.bat" is available that perl", and type "runperl". Explain the observed behavior, or lack thereof. :) Hint: .gnidnats llits er'uoy fi ,"lrepnur" eteled :tniH Miscellaneous Things A full set of HTML documentation is installed, so you should be able to use it if you have a web browser installed on your system. "perldoc" is also a useful tool for browsing information contained in the documentation, espe cially in conjunction with a pager like "less" (recent versions of which have Win32 support). You may have to set the PAGER environment variable to use a specific pager. "perldoc -f foo" will print information about the perl operator "foo". One common mistake when using this port with a GUI library like "Tk" is assuming that Perl's normal behavior of opening a command-line window will go away. This isn't the case. If you want to start a copy of "perl" without opening a command-line window, use the "wperl" executable built during the installation process. Usage is exactly the same as normal "perl" on Win32, except that options like "-h" don't work (since they need a command-line window to print to). If you find bugs in perl, you can run "perlbug" to create a bug report (you may have to send it manu ally if "perlbug" cannot find a mailer on your system).

BUGS AND CAVEATS

Norton AntiVirus interferes with the build process, par ticularly if set to "AutoProtect, All Files, when Opened". Unlike large applications the perl build process opens and modifies a lot of files. Having the the AntiVirus scan each and every one slows build the process significantly. Worse, with PERLIO=stdio the build process fails with peculiar messages as the virus checker interacts badly with miniperl.exe writing configure files (it seems to either catch file part written and treat it as suspicious, or virus checker may have it "locked" in a way which inhibits miniperl updating it). The build does complete with set PERLIO=perlio but that may be just luck. Other AntiVirus software may have similar issues. full list. Signal handling may not behave as on Unix platforms (where it doesn't exactly "behave", either :). For instance, calling "die()" or "exit()" from signal handlers will cause an exception, since most implementations of "sig nal()" on Win32 are severely crippled. Thus, signals may work only for simple things like setting a flag variable in the handler. Using signals under this port should cur rently be considered unsupported. Please send detailed descriptions of any problems and solutions that you may find to <perlbug@perl.com>, along with the output produced by "perl -V".

HISTORY

This port was originally contributed by Gary Ng around 5.003_24, and borrowed from the Hip Communications port that was available at the time. Various people have made numerous and sundry hacks since then. Borland support was added in 5.004_01 (Gurusamy Sarathy). GCC/mingw32 support was added in 5.005 (Nick Ing-Simmons). Support for PERL_OBJECT was added in 5.005 (ActiveState Tool Corp). Support for fork() emulation was added in 5.6 (ActiveState Tool Corp). Win9x support was added in 5.6 (Benjamin Stuhl). Support for 64-bit Windows added in 5.8 (ActiveState Corp). Last updated: 20 April 2002 perl v5.8.1 2003-09-02 PERLWIN32(1)

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perlwin32

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

BUGS AND CAVEATS

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HISTORY