perlwin32
SYNOPSIS
These are instructions for building Perl under Windows
9x/NT/2000/XP on the Intel x86 and Itanium architectures.
DESCRIPTION
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".
AUTHORS
Gary Ng <71564.1743@CompuServe.COM>
Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@activestate.com>
Nick Ing-Simmons <nick@ing-simmons.net>
This document is maintained by Gurusamy Sarathy.
SEE ALSO
perl
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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