perl(1) User Commands perl(1)NAMEperl - Practical Extraction and Report Language
SYNOPSISperl [-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 follow‐
ing 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
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
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
perlsolaris Perl notes for Solaris
Platform-Specific
If you're new to Perl, you should start with perlintro, which is a gen‐
eral intro for beginners and provides some background to help you navi‐
gate 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/ direc‐
tory.
Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is available. This
additional documentation is in the /usr/perl5/man directory. Some of
this additional documentation 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 run‐
ning catman(1M) on the Perl manual pages is not supported. 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, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, mini‐
mal).
Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best fea‐
tures 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. 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 little 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 re‐
write that provides the following additional benefits:
· Modularity and reusability using innumerable modules Described in
perlmod, perlmodlib, and perlmodinstall.
· Embeddable and extensible Described in perlembed, perlxstut, per‐
lxs, perlcall, perlguts, and xsubpp.
· Roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple simultaneous DBM
implementations). Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.
· Subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and prototyped.
Described in perlsub.
· Arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous functions.
Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perllol.
· Object-oriented programming. Described in perlobj, perlboot, perl‐
toot, perltooc, and perlbot.
· Support for light-weight processes (threads). Described in
perlthrtut and threads.
· Support for Unicode, internationalization, and localization
Described in perluniintro, perllocale and Locale::Maketext.
· Lexical scoping. Described in perlsub.
· Regular expression enhancements. Described in perlre, with addi‐
tional examples in perlop.
· Enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment, with inte‐
grated editor support. Described in perldebtut, perldebug and
perldebguts.
· 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 direc‐
tory 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 gratitude to Larry and the Perl develop‐
ers, please write to perl-thanks@perl.org .
FILES
"@INC" Locations of Perl libraries
ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:
┌─────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────┐
│ ATTRIBUTE TYPE │ ATTRIBUTE VALUE │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Availability │SUNWperl584core, SUNW‐ │
│ │perl584usr, SUNWperl584man, │
│ │SUNWpl5u, SUNWpl5v SUN‐ │
│ │Wpl5p, SUNWpl5m │
│ │ │
│ │See below. │
├─────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────┤
│Interface Stability │See below. │
└─────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────┘
Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually all
Unix-like platforms. See "Supported Platforms" in perlport for a list‐
ing.
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 normally terse warnings
and errors into these longer forms.
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 mes‐
sages 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 information, 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 perl‐
gcc(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 prac‐
ticable, 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 various opera‐
tions such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point output with
sprintf().
If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a par‐
ticular 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 num‐
bers 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 configuration
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 compil‐
ing 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.
SunOS 5.10 30 Jul 2004 perl(1)
