PERLFAQ2(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLFAQ2(1)NAMEperlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl ($Revision:
1.32 $, $Date: 1999/10/14 18:46:09 $)
DESCRIPTION
This section of the FAQ answers questions about where to
find source and documentation for Perl, support, and
related matters.
What machines support Perl? Where do I get it?
The standard release of Perl (the one maintained by the
perl development team) is distributed only in source code
form. You can find this at http://www.cpan.org/src/lat
est.tar.gz , which is in a standard Internet format (a
gzipped archive in POSIX tar format).
Perl builds and runs on a bewildering number of platforms.
Virtually all known and current Unix derivatives are sup
ported (Perl's native platform), as are other systems like
VMS, DOS, OS/2, Windows, QNX, BeOS, OS X, MPE/iX and the
Amiga.
Binary distributions for some proprietary platforms,
including Apple systems, can be found
http://www.cpan.org/ports/ directory. Because these are
not part of the standard distribution, they may and in
fact do differ from the base Perl port in a variety of
ways. You'll have to check their respective release notes
to see just what the differences are. These differences
can be either positive (e.g. extensions for the features
of the particular platform that are not supported in the
source release of perl) or negative (e.g. might be based
upon a less current source release of perl).
How can I get a binary version of Perl?
If you don't have a C compiler because your vendor for
whatever reasons did not include one with your system, the
best thing to do is grab a binary version of gcc from the
net and use that to compile perl with. CPAN only has
binaries for systems that are terribly hard to get free
compilers for, not for Unix systems.
Some URLs that might help you are:
http://www.cpan.org/ports/
http://language.perl.com/info/software.html
Someone looking for a Perl for Win16 might look to Laszlo
Molnar's djgpp port in http://www.cpan.org/ports/#msdos ,
which comes with clear installation instructions. A sim
ple installation guide for MS-DOS using Ilya Zakharevich's
OS/2 port is available at
http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perl5dos.html and similarly
for Windows 3.1 at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perl
win3.html .
I don't have a C compiler on my system. How can I compile
perl?
Since you don't have a C compiler, you're doomed and your
vendor should be sacrificed to the Sun gods. But that
doesn't help you.
What you need to do is get a binary version of gcc for
your system first. Consult the Usenet FAQs for your oper
ating system for information on where to get such a binary
version.
I copied the Perl binary from one machine to another, but
scripts don't work.
That's probably because you forgot libraries, or library
paths differ. You really should build the whole distribu
tion on the machine it will eventually live on, and then
type "make install". Most other approaches are doomed to
failure.
One simple way to check that things are in the right place
is to print out the hard-coded @INC that perl looks
through for libraries:
% perl -e 'print join("\n",@INC)'
If this command lists any paths that don't exist on your
system, then you may need to move the appropriate
libraries to these locations, or create symbolic links,
aliases, or shortcuts appropriately. @INC is also printed
as part of the output of
% perl -V
You might also want to check out the How do I keep my own
module/library directory? entry in the perlfaq8 manpage.
I grabbed the sources and tried to compile but
gdbm/dynamic loading/malloc/linking/... failed. How do I
make it work?
Read the INSTALL file, which is part of the source distri
bution. It describes in detail how to cope with most
idiosyncrasies that the Configure script can't work around
for any given system or architecture.
What modules and extensions are available for Perl? What
is CPAN? What does CPAN/src/... mean?
CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a
~700mb archive replicated on nearly 200 machines all over
the world. CPAN contains source code, non-native ports,
documentation, scripts, and many third-party modules and
extensions, designed for everything from commercial
database interfaces to keyboard/screen control to web
walking and CGI scripts. The master web site for CPAN is
http://www.cpan.org/ and there is the CPAN Multiplexer at
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/CPAN.html which will choose a
mirror near you via DNS. See http://www.perl.com/CPAN
(without a slash at the end) for how this process works.
Also, http://mirror.cpan.org/ has a nice interface to the
http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORED.BY mirror directory.
See the CPAN FAQ at http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html
for answers to the most frequently asked questions about
CPAN including how to become a mirror.
CPAN/path/... is a naming convention for files available
on CPAN sites. CPAN indicates the base directory of a
CPAN mirror, and the rest of the path is the path from
that directory to the file. For instance, if you're using
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN as your CPAN
site, the file CPAN/misc/japh is downloadable as
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/misc/japh .
Considering that there are close to two thousand existing
modules in the archive, one probably exists to do nearly
anything you can think of. Current categories under
CPAN/modules/by-category/ include Perl core modules;
development support; operating system interfaces; network
ing, devices, and interprocess communication; data type
utilities; database interfaces; user interfaces; inter
faces to other languages; filenames, file systems, and
file locking; internationalization and locale; world wide
web support; server and daemon utilities; archiving and
compression; image manipulation; mail and news; control
flow utilities; filehandle and I/O; Microsoft Windows mod
ules; and miscellaneous modules.
See http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html or
http://search.cpan.org/ for a more complete list of mod
ules by category.
Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?
Certainly not. Larry expects that he'll be certified
before Perl is.
Where can I get information on Perl?
The complete Perl documentation is available with the Perl
distribution. If you have Perl installed locally, you
probably have the documentation installed as well: type
"man perl" if you're on a system resembling Unix. This
will lead you to other important man pages, including how
to set your $MANPATH. If you're not on a Unix system,
access to the documentation will be different; for exam
ple, documentation might only be in HTML format. All
proper Perl installations have fully-accessible documenta
tion.
You might also try "perldoc perl" in case your system
doesn't have a proper man command, or it's been misin
stalled. If that doesn't work, try looking in
/usr/local/lib/perl5/pod for documentation.
If all else fails, consult http://perldoc.cpan.org/ or
http://www.perldoc.com/ both offer the complete documenta
tion in html format.
Many good books have been written about Perl--see the sec
tion below for more details.
Tutorial documents are included in current or upcoming
Perl releases include the perltoot manpage for objects or
the perlboot manpage for a beginner's approach to objects,
the perlopentut manpage for file opening semantics, the
perlreftut manpage for managing references, the perlretut
manpage for regular expressions, the perlthrtut manpage
for threads, the perldebtut manpage for debugging, and the
perlxstut manpage for linking C and Perl together. There
may be more by the time you read this. The following URLs
might also be of assistance:
http://perldoc.cpan.org/
http://www.perldoc.com/
http://reference.perl.com/query.cgi?tutorials
http://bookmarks.cpan.org/search.cgi?cat=Training%2FTutorials
What are the Perl newsgroups on Usenet? Where do I post
questions?
The now defunct comp.lang.perl newsgroup has been super
seded by the following groups:
comp.lang.perl.announce Moderated announcement group
comp.lang.perl.misc Very busy group about Perl in general
comp.lang.perl.moderated Moderated discussion group
comp.lang.perl.modules Use and development of Perl modules
comp.lang.perl.tk Using Tk (and X) from Perl
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Writing CGI scripts for the Web.
There is also Usenet gateway to the mailing list used by
the crack Perl development team (perl5-porters) at
news://news.perl.com/perl.porters-gw/ .
Where should I post source code?
You should post source code to whichever group is most
appropriate, but feel free to cross-post to
comp.lang.perl.misc. If you want to cross-post to
alt.sources, please make sure it follows their posting
standards, including setting the Followup-To header line
to NOT include alt.sources; see their FAQ
(http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-sources-intro/) for details.
If you're just looking for software, first use Google
(http://www.google.com), Deja (http://www.deja.com), and
CPAN Search (http://search.cpan.org). This is faster and
more productive than just posting a request.
Perl Books
A number of books on Perl and/or CGI programming are
available. A few of these are good, some are OK, but many
aren't worth your money. Tom Christiansen maintains a
list of these books, some with extensive reviews, at
http://www.perl.com/perl/critiques/index.html .
The incontestably definitive reference book on Perl, writ
ten by the creator of Perl, is now (July 2000) in its
third edition:
Programming Perl (the "Camel Book"):
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
(English, translations to several languages are also available)
The companion volume to the Camel containing thousands of
real-world examples, mini-tutorials, and complete programs
is:
The Perl Cookbook (the "Ram Book"):
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington,
with Foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-243-3 [1st Edition August 1998]
http://perl.oreilly.com/cookbook/
If you're already a hard-core systems programmer, then the
Camel Book might suffice for you to learn Perl from. If
you're not, check out
Learning Perl (the "Llama Book"):
by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen
with Foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-284-0 [2nd Edition July 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl2/
Despite the picture at the URL above, the second edition
of "Llama Book" really has a blue cover and was updated
for the 5.004 release of Perl. Various foreign language
editions are available, including Learning Perl on Win32
Systems (the "Gecko Book").
If you're not an accidental programmer, but a more serious
and possibly even degreed computer scientist who doesn't
need as much hand-holding as we try to provide in the
Llama or its defurred cousin the Gecko, please check out
the delightful book, Perl: The Programmer's Companion,
written by Nigel Chapman.
Addison-Wesley (http://www.awlonline.com/) and Manning
(http://www.manning.com/) are also publishers of some fine
Perl books such as Object Oriented Programming with Perl
by Damian Conway and Network Programming with Perl by Lin
coln Stein.
An excellent technical book discounter is Bookpool at
http://www.bookpool.com/ where a 30% discount or more is
not unusual.
What follows is a list of the books that the FAQ authors
found personally useful. Your mileage may (but, we hope,
probably won't) vary.
Recommended books on (or mostly on) Perl follow.
References
Programming Perl
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
Perl 5 Pocket Reference
by Johan Vromans
ISBN 0-596-00032-4 [3rd edition May 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr3/
Perl in a Nutshell
by Ellen Siever, Stephan Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan
ISBN 1-56592-286-7 [1st edition December 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlnut/
Tutorials
Elements of Programming with Perl
by Andrew L. Johnson
ISBN 1884777805 [1st edition October 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Johnson/
Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Christiansen
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-284-0 [2nd edition July 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl2/
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1st edition October 1997]
http://catalog.wiley.com/title.cgi?isbn=047197563X
Cross-Platform Perl
by Eric Foster-Johnson
ISBN 1-55851-483-X [2nd edition September 2000]
http://www.pconline.com/~erc/perlbook.htm
MacPerl: Power and Ease
by Vicki Brown and Chris Nandor,
with foreword by Matthias Neeracher
ISBN 1-881957-32-2 [1st edition May 1998]
http://www.macperl.com/ptf_book/
Task-Oriented
The Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-243-3 [1st edition August 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/
Effective Perl Programming
by Joseph Hall
ISBN 0-201-41975-0 [1st edition 1998]
http://www.awl.com/
Special Topics
Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
ISBN 1-56592-257-3 [1st edition January 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/
Network Programming with Perl
by Lincoln Stein
ISBN 0-201-61571-1 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.awlonline.com/
Object Oriented Perl
Damian Conway
with foreword by Randal L. Schwartz
ISBN 1884777791 [1st edition August 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Conway/
Data Munging with Perl
Dave Cross
ISBN 1930110006 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.manning.com/cross
Learning Perl/Tk
by Nancy Walsh
ISBN 1-56592-314-6 [1st edition January 1999]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperltk/
Perl in Magazines
The first and only periodical devoted to All Things Perl,
The Perl Journal contained tutorials, demonstrations, case
studies, announcements, contests, and much more. TPJ had
columns on web development, databases, Win32 Perl, graphi
cal programming, regular expressions, and networking, and
sponsored the Obfuscated Perl Contest. Sadly, this publi
cation is no longer in circulation, but should it be res
urrected, it will most likely be announced on
http://use.perl.org/ .
Beyond this, magazines that frequently carry high-quality
articles on Perl are Web Techniques (see
http://www.webtechniques.com/), Performance Computing
(http://www.performance-computing.com/), and Usenix's
newsletter/magazine to its members, login:, at
http://www.usenix.org/. Randal's Web Technique's columns
are available on the web at http://www.stonehenge.com/mer
lyn/WebTechniques/ .
Perl on the Net: FTP and WWW Access
To get the best performance, pick a site from the list
below and use it to grab the complete list of mirror sites
which is at /CPAN/MIRRORED.BY or at http://mir
ror.cpan.org/. From there you can find the quickest site
for you. Remember, the following list is not the complete
list of CPAN mirrors (the complete list contains 165 sites
as of January 2001):
http://www.cpan.org/
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/
http://download.sourceforge.net/mirrors/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.digital.com/pub/plan/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.flirble.org/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.uvsq.fr/pub/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/
ftp://ftp.dti.ad.jp/pub/lang/CPAN/
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/perl/CPAN/
ftp://cpan.if.usp.br/pub/mirror/CPAN/
One may also use xx.cpan.org where "xx" is the 2-letter
country code for your domain; e.g. Australia would use
au.cpan.org.
What mailing lists are there for Perl?
Most of the major modules (Tk, CGI, libwww-perl) have
their own mailing lists. Consult the documentation that
came with the module for subscription information.
http://lists.cpan.org/
Archives of comp.lang.perl.misc
Have you tried Deja or AltaVista? Those are the best
archives. Just look up "*perl*" as a newsgroup.
http://www.deja.com/dnquery.xp?QRY=&DBS=2&ST=PS&defaultOp=AND&LNG=ALL&format=terse&showsort=date&maxhits=25&subjects=&groups=*perl*&authors=&fromdate=&todate=
You might want to trim that down a bit, though.
You'll probably want more a sophisticated query and
retrieval mechanism than a file listing, preferably one
that allows you to retrieve articles using a fast-access
indices, keyed on at least author, date, subject, thread
(as in "trn") and probably keywords. The best solution
the FAQ authors know of is the MH pick command, but it is
very slow to select on 18000 articles.
If you have, or know where can be found, the missing sec
tions, please let perlfaq-suggestions@perl.com know.
Where can I buy a commercial version of Perl?
In a real sense, Perl already is commercial software: it
has a license that you can grab and carefully read to your
manager. It is distributed in releases and comes in well-
defined packages. There is a very large user community and
an extensive literature. The comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups
and several of the mailing lists provide free answers to
your questions in near real-time. Perl has traditionally
been supported by Larry, scores of software designers and
developers, and myriads of programmers, all working for
free to create a useful thing to make life better for
everyone.
However, these answers may not suffice for managers who
require a purchase order from a company whom they can sue
should anything go awry. Or maybe they need very serious
hand-holding and contractual obligations. Shrink-wrapped
CDs with Perl on them are available from several sources
if that will help. For example, many Perl books include a
distribution of Perl, as do the O'Reilly Perl Resource
Kits (in both the Unix flavor and in the proprietary
Microsoft flavor); the free Unix distributions also all
come with Perl.
Alternatively, you can purchase commercial incidence based
support through the Perl Clinic. The following is a com
mercial from them:
"The Perl Clinic is a commercial Perl support service
operated by ActiveState Tool Corp. and The Ingram Group.
The operators have many years of in-depth experience with
Perl applications and Perl internals on a wide range of
platforms.
"Through our group of highly experienced and well-trained
support engineers, we will put our best effort into under
standing your problem, providing an explanation of the
situation, and a recommendation on how to proceed."
Contact The Perl Clinic at
www.PerlClinic.com
North America Pacific Standard Time (GMT-8)
Tel: 1 604 606-4611 hours 8am-6pm
Fax: 1 604 606-4640
Europe (GMT)
Tel: 00 44 1483 862814
Fax: 00 44 1483 862801
See also www.perl.com for updates on tutorials, training,
and support.
Where do I send bug reports?
If you are reporting a bug in the perl interpreter or the
modules shipped with Perl, use the perlbug program in the
Perl distribution or mail your report to perlbug@perl.org
.
If you are posting a bug with a non-standard port (see the
answer to "What platforms is Perl available for?"), a
binary distribution, or a non-standard module (such as Tk,
CGI, etc), then please see the documentation that came
with it to determine the correct place to post bugs.
Read the perlbug(1) man page (perl5.004 or later) for more
information.
What is perl.com? Perl Mongers? pm.org? perl.org?
The Perl Home Page at http://www.perl.com/ is currently
hosted on a T3 line courtesy of Songline Systems, a soft
ware-oriented subsidiary of O'Reilly and Associates. Other
starting points include
http://language.perl.com/
http://conference.perl.com/
http://reference.perl.com/
Perl Mongers is an advocacy organization for the Perl lan
guage which maintains the web site http://www.perl.org/ as
a general advocacy site for the Perl language.
Perl Mongers uses the pm.org domain for services related
to Perl user groups, including the hosting of mailing
lists and web sites. See the Perl user group web site at
http://www.pm.org/ for more information about joining,
starting, or requesting services for a Perl user group.
Perl Mongers also maintain the perl.org domain to provide
general support services to the Perl community, including
the hosting of mailing lists, web sites, and other ser
vices. The web site http://www.perl.org/ is a general
advocacy site for the Perl language, and there are many
other sub-domains for special topics, such as
http://bugs.perl.org/
http://history.perl.org/
http://lists.perl.org/
http://news.perl.org/
http://use.perl.org/
AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2001 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Tork
ington. All rights reserved.
When included as an integrated part of the Standard Dis
tribution of Perl or of its documentation (printed or oth
erwise), this works is covered under Perl's Artistic
License. For separate distributions of all or part of
this FAQ outside of that, see the perlfaq manpage.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here
are in the public domain. You are permitted and encour
aged to use this code and any derivatives thereof in your
own programs for fun or for profit as you see fit. A sim
ple comment in the code giving credit to the FAQ would be
courteous but is not required.
2001-04-07 perl v5.6.1 PERLFAQ2(1)
