PERLUTIL(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLUTIL(1)NAMEperlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
DESCRIPTION
Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribu
tion installs a range of utilities on your system. There
are also several utilities which are used by the Perl dis
tribution itself as part of the install process. This doc
ument exists to list all of these utilities, explain what
they are for and provide pointers to each module's docu
mentation, if appropriate.
DOCUMENTATION
perldoc
The main interface to Perl's documentation is "perl
doc", although if you're reading this, it's more than
likely that you've already found it. perldoc will
extract and format the documentation from any file in
the current directory, any Perl module installed on the
system, or any of the standard documentation pages,
such as this one. Use "perldoc <name>" to get informa
tion on any of the utilities described in this docu
ment.
pod2man and pod2text
If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call
pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see
the perlpod manpage for an explanation) into a man
page, and then run man to display it; if man isn't
available, pod2text will be used instead and the output
piped through your favourite pager.
pod2html and pod2latex
As well as these two, there are two other converters:
pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD, and
pod2latex, which produces LaTeX files.
pod2usage
If you just want to know how to use the utilities
described here, pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE"
section; some of the utilities will automatically call
pod2usage on themselves when you call them with
"-help".
podselect
pod2usage is a special case of podselect, a utility to
extract named sections from documents written in POD.
For instance, while utilities have "USAGE" sections,
Perl modules usually have "SYNOPSIS" sections: "podse
lect -s "SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this section for a
given file.
podchecker
If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the
podchecker utility will look for errors in your markup.
splain
splain is an interface to the perldiag manpage - paste
in your error message to it, and it'll explain it for
you.
roffitall
The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your system
but lives in the pod/ directory of your Perl source
kit; it converts all the documentation from the distri
bution to *roff format, and produces a typeset
PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
CONVERTORS
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've
included three conversion filters:
a2p
a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs; for example,
"a2p -F:" on the simple awk script "{print $2}" will
produce a Perl program based around this code:
while (<>) {
($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
print $Fld2;
}
s2p
Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl programs.
s2p run on "s/foo/bar" will produce a Perl program
based around this:
while (<>) {
chomp;
s/foo/bar/g;
print if $printit;
}
find2perl
Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl
equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an
example, "find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print"
produces the following callback subroutine for
"File::Find":
sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
$uid == $uid{'root'}) &&
(($mode & 0777) == 04000);
print("$name\n");
}
As well as these filters for converting other languages,
the pl2pm utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4
libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.
Development
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing
Perl programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
perlbug
perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the
perl interpreter itself or any of the standard library
modules back to the developers; please read through the
documentation for perlbug thoroughly before using it to
submit a bug report.
h2ph
Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with
C libraries, programmers used to get library constants
by reading through the C header files. You may still
see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar around - the .ph
file should be created by running h2ph on the corre
sponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more
on how to convert a whole bunch of header files at
ones.
c2ph and pstruct
c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program
but behave differently depending on how they are
called, provide another way of getting at C with Perl -
they'll convert C structures and union declarations to
Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs these
days.
h2xs
h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will
try and write as much glue between C libraries and Perl
modules as it can. It's also very useful for creating
skeletons of pure Perl modules.
dprofpp
Perl comes with a profiler, the Devel::Dprof module.
The dprofpp utility analyzes the output of this pro
filer and tells you which subroutines are taking up the
most run time. See the Devel::Dprof manpage for more
information.
perlcc
perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl com
piler suite.
SEE ALSO
perldoc, pod2man, the perlpod manpage, pod2html,
pod2usage, podselect, podchecker, splain, the perldiag
manpage, roffitall, a2p, s2p, find2perl, File::Find,
pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs, dprofpp, the
Devel::Dprof manpage, perlcc
2001-03-18 perl v5.6.1 PERLUTIL(1)
