PERLAMIGA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLAMIGA(1)NAMEperlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
SYNOPSIS
One can read this document in the following formats:
man perlamiga
multiview perlamiga.guide
to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or
it may be read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/per_
lamiga.pod.
A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the
Geek Gadgets section of the Aminet:
http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dirs/dev_gg.html
DESCRIPTION
Prerequisites
Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most
important part is ixemul.library. For a minimum
setup, get the latest versions of the following
packages from the Aminet archives
(http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/):
ixemul-bin
ixemul-env-bin
pdksh-bin
Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might
want to add other packages of ADE (the Amiga Devel_
opers Environment).
Version of Amiga OS
You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Rec
ommended is version 3.1.
Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2
arg3" the same way as on any other platform, by
perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl
itself (as opposed to to your program), use
perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the sys
tem's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syn
tax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you
can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with
foo arg1 arg2 arg3
(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl
is not necessary, perl would be enough, but having full
path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.)
Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS
Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX
because of deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most
notably:
fork()
some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link
count and file dates
inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
umask() works, but the correct permissions are only
set when the file is finally close()d
INSTALLATION
Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:),
and extract the binary distribution:
lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha
or
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz
(Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropri
ate docs.
Accessing documentation
Manpages
If you have "man" installed on your system, and you
installed perl manpages, use something like this:
man perlfunc
man less
man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
to access documentation for different components of Perl.
Start with
man perl
Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for
manpages in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the
man pages for the perl library will not be found.
Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for docu
mentation for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need
to give the section - "3" above - to avoid shadowing by
the less(1) manpage.
HTML
If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML
docs. Cd to directory with .pod files, and do like this
cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
pod2html
After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html
in this directory, and go ahead with reading docs.
Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt
from "CPAN".
GNU "info" files
Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially
with "CPerl" mode loaded. You need to get latest
"pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alternately, prebuilt info
pages.
"LaTeX" docs
can be constructed using "pod2latex".
BUILD
Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
Prerequisites
You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for
Amiga) from Aminet.
Getting the perl source
You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from
Ninemoons and extract it with:
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz
or get the official source from CPAN:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0
Extract it like this
tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz
You will see a message about errors while extracting Con_
figure. This is normal and expected. (There is a conflict
with a similarly-named file configure, but it causes no
harm.)
Making
remember to use a healthy sized stack (I used 2000000)
your PATH environment variable must include /bin (e.g.
".:/bin" is good) (or, more precisely, it must include
the directory where you have your basic UNIX utilities
like test, cat, sed, and so on)
sh Configure -Dprefix=/ade -Dloclibpth=/ade/lib
fix makedepend
In the file 'makedepend' there are three spots like this `$cat ...`:
a for loop near line 75, an egrep near line 161, and a for loop near
line 175. In all those spots using an editor change the $cat to
/bin/cat.
now type make depend
When the make depend has ended load the gnumakefile into
an editor and go to the end of the file.
Move upwards in the file until you reach av.o: EXTERN.h
and delete all lines down to # WARNING: Put....
now go to the x2p directory
Load the gnumakefile into an editor.
Go to the end moveup until you reach hash.o: EXTERN.h
and delete all lines dowonwards until you reach a line saying
# WARNING: Put nothing....
Now!
make
Testing
Now run
make test
Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork()
function:
io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t,
lib/open3.t, lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t
Installing the built perl
Run
make install
AUTHORS
Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik
Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se
SEE ALSOperl(1).
2001-03-18 perl v5.6.1 PERLAMIGA(1)
