perl(1)

Name | Synopsis | Description | Tutorials | Platform-Specific | Environment Variables | AUTHOR | Files | Attributes | See Also | Diagnostics | Notes | Bugs

Name

perl– Practical Extraction and Report Language

Synopsis

perl [-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 following 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 general intro for beginners and provides some background to help you navigate 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/ directory.

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 running 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, minimal).

Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features 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 rewrite 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, perlxs, 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, perltoot, 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 additional examples in perlop.

• Enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment, with integrated 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 directory 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 developers, 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, SUNWperl584usr, SUNWperl584man, SUNWpl5u, SUNWpl5v SUNWpl5p, 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 listing.

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 messages 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 perlgcc(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 practicable, 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 operations 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 particular 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 numbers 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 compiling 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  Last Revised 30 Jul 2004

Name | Synopsis | Description | Tutorials | Platform-Specific | Environment Variables | AUTHOR | Files | Attributes | See Also | Diagnostics | Notes | Bugs