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perlport (1)

Name

perlport - Writing portable Perl

Synopsis

Please see following description for synopsis

Description




Perl Programmers Reference Guide                      PERLPORT(1)



NAME
     perlport - Writing portable Perl

DESCRIPTION
     Perl runs on numerous operating systems.  While most of them
     share much in common, they also have their own unique
     features.

     This document is meant to help you to find out what
     constitutes portable Perl code.  That way once you make a
     decision to write portably, you know where the lines are
     drawn, and you can stay within them.

     There is a tradeoff between taking full advantage of one
     particular type of computer and taking advantage of a full
     range of them.  Naturally, as you broaden your range and
     become more diverse, the common factors drop, and you are
     left with an increasingly smaller area of common ground in
     which you can operate to accomplish a particular task.
     Thus, when you begin attacking a problem, it is important to
     consider under which part of the tradeoff curve you want to
     operate.  Specifically, you must decide whether it is
     important that the task that you are coding have the full
     generality of being portable, or whether to just get the job
     done right now.  This is the hardest choice to be made.  The
     rest is easy, because Perl provides many choices, whichever
     way you want to approach your problem.

     Looking at it another way, writing portable code is usually
     about willfully limiting your available choices.  Naturally,
     it takes discipline and sacrifice to do that.  The product
     of portability and convenience may be a constant.  You have
     been warned.

     Be aware of two important points:

     Not all Perl programs have to be portable
         There is no reason you should not use Perl as a language
         to glue Unix tools together, or to prototype a Macintosh
         application, or to manage the Windows registry.  If it
         makes no sense to aim for portability for one reason or
         another in a given program, then don't bother.

     Nearly all of Perl already is portable
         Don't be fooled into thinking that it is hard to create
         portable Perl code.  It isn't.  Perl tries its level-
         best to bridge the gaps between what's available on
         different platforms, and all the means available to use
         those features.  Thus almost all Perl code runs on any
         machine without modification.  But there are some
         significant issues in writing portable code, and this
         document is entirely about those issues.



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     Here's the general rule: When you approach a task commonly
     done using a whole range of platforms, think about writing
     portable code.  That way, you don't sacrifice much by way of
     the implementation choices you can avail yourself of, and at
     the same time you can give your users lots of platform
     choices.  On the other hand, when you have to take advantage
     of some unique feature of a particular platform, as is often
     the case with systems programming (whether for Unix,
     Windows, VMS, etc.), consider writing platform-specific
     code.

     When the code will run on only two or three operating
     systems, you may need to consider only the differences of
     those particular systems.  The important thing is to decide
     where the code will run and to be deliberate in your
     decision.

     The material below is separated into three main sections:
     main issues of portability ("ISSUES"), platform-specific
     issues ("PLATFORMS"), and built-in perl functions that
     behave differently on various ports ("FUNCTION
     IMPLEMENTATIONS").

     This information should not be considered complete; it
     includes possibly transient information about idiosyncrasies
     of some of the ports, almost all of which are in a state of
     constant evolution.  Thus, this material should be
     considered a perpetual work in progress ("<IMG
     SRC="yellow_sign.gif" ALT="Under Construction">").

ISSUES
  Newlines
     In most operating systems, lines in files are terminated by
     newlines.  Just what is used as a newline may vary from OS
     to OS.  Unix traditionally uses "\012", one type of DOSish
     I/O uses "\015\012", and Mac OS uses "\015".

     Perl uses "\n" to represent the "logical" newline, where
     what is logical may depend on the platform in use.  In
     MacPerl, "\n" always means "\015".  In DOSish perls, "\n"
     usually means "\012", but when accessing a file in "text"
     mode, perl uses the ":crlf" layer that translates it to (or
     from) "\015\012", depending on whether you're reading or
     writing. Unix does the same thing on ttys in canonical mode.
     "\015\012" is commonly referred to as CRLF.

     To trim trailing newlines from text lines use chomp().  With
     default settings that function looks for a trailing "\n"
     character and thus trims in a portable way.

     When dealing with binary files (or text files in binary
     mode) be sure to explicitly set $/ to the appropriate value



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     for your file format before using chomp().

     Because of the "text" mode translation, DOSish perls have
     limitations in using "seek" and "tell" on a file accessed in
     "text" mode.  Stick to "seek"-ing to locations you got from
     "tell" (and no others), and you are usually free to use
     "seek" and "tell" even in "text" mode.  Using "seek" or
     "tell" or other file operations may be non-portable.  If you
     use "binmode" on a file, however, you can usually "seek" and
     "tell" with arbitrary values in safety.

     A common misconception in socket programming is that "\n" eq
     "\012" everywhere.  When using protocols such as common
     Internet protocols, "\012" and "\015" are called for
     specifically, and the values of the logical "\n" and "\r"
     (carriage return) are not reliable.

         print SOCKET "Hi there, client!\r\n";      # WRONG
         print SOCKET "Hi there, client!\015\012";  # RIGHT

     However, using "\015\012" (or "\cM\cJ", or "\x0D\x0A") can
     be tedious and unsightly, as well as confusing to those
     maintaining the code.  As such, the Socket module supplies
     the Right Thing for those who want it.

         use Socket qw(:DEFAULT :crlf);
         print SOCKET "Hi there, client!$CRLF"      # RIGHT

     When reading from a socket, remember that the default input
     record separator $/ is "\n", but robust socket code will
     recognize as either "\012" or "\015\012" as end of line:

         while (<SOCKET>) {
             # ...
         }

     Because both CRLF and LF end in LF, the input record
     separator can be set to LF and any CR stripped later.
     Better to write:

         use Socket qw(:DEFAULT :crlf);
         local($/) = LF;      # not needed if $/ is already \012

         while (<SOCKET>) {
             s/$CR?$LF/\n/;   # not sure if socket uses LF or CRLF, OK
         #   s/\015?\012/\n/; # same thing
         }

     This example is preferred over the previous one--even for
     Unix platforms--because now any "\015"'s ("\cM"'s) are
     stripped out (and there was much rejoicing).




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     Similarly, functions that return text data--such as a
     function that fetches a web page--should sometimes translate
     newlines before returning the data, if they've not yet been
     translated to the local newline representation.  A single
     line of code will often suffice:

         $data =~ s/\015?\012/\n/g;
         return $data;

     Some of this may be confusing.  Here's a handy reference to
     the ASCII CR and LF characters.  You can print it out and
     stick it in your wallet.

         LF  eq  \012  eq  \x0A  eq  \cJ  eq  chr(10)  eq  ASCII 10
         CR  eq  \015  eq  \x0D  eq  \cM  eq  chr(13)  eq  ASCII 13

                  | Unix | DOS  | Mac  |
             ---------------------------
             \n   |  LF  |  LF  |  CR  |
             \r   |  CR  |  CR  |  LF  |
             \n * |  LF  | CRLF |  CR  |
             \r * |  CR  |  CR  |  LF  |
             ---------------------------
             * text-mode STDIO

     The Unix column assumes that you are not accessing a serial
     line (like a tty) in canonical mode.  If you are, then CR on
     input becomes "\n", and "\n" on output becomes CRLF.

     These are just the most common definitions of "\n" and "\r"
     in Perl.  There may well be others.  For example, on an
     EBCDIC implementation such as z/OS (OS/390) or OS/400 (using
     the ILE, the PASE is ASCII-based) the above material is
     similar to "Unix" but the code numbers change:

         LF  eq  \025  eq  \x15  eq  \cU  eq  chr(21)  eq  CP-1047 21
         LF  eq  \045  eq  \x25  eq           chr(37)  eq  CP-0037 37
         CR  eq  \015  eq  \x0D  eq  \cM  eq  chr(13)  eq  CP-1047 13
         CR  eq  \015  eq  \x0D  eq  \cM  eq  chr(13)  eq  CP-0037 13

                  | z/OS | OS/400 |
             ----------------------
             \n   |  LF  |  LF    |
             \r   |  CR  |  CR    |
             \n * |  LF  |  LF    |
             \r * |  CR  |  CR    |
             ----------------------
             * text-mode STDIO

  Numbers endianness and Width
     Different CPUs store integers and floating point numbers in
     different orders (called endianness) and widths (32-bit and



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     64-bit being the most common today).  This affects your
     programs when they attempt to transfer numbers in binary
     format from one CPU architecture to another, usually either
     "live" via network connection, or by storing the numbers to
     secondary storage such as a disk file or tape.

     Conflicting storage orders make utter mess out of the
     numbers.  If a little-endian host (Intel, VAX) stores
     0x12345678 (305419896 in decimal), a big-endian host
     (Motorola, Sparc, PA) reads it as 0x78563412 (2018915346 in
     decimal).  Alpha and MIPS can be either: Digital/Compaq
     used/uses them in little-endian mode; SGI/Cray uses them in
     big-endian mode.  To avoid this problem in network (socket)
     connections use the "pack" and "unpack" formats "n" and "N",
     the "network" orders.  These are guaranteed to be portable.

     As of perl 5.9.2, you can also use the ">" and "<" modifiers
     to force big- or little-endian byte-order.  This is useful
     if you want to store signed integers or 64-bit integers, for
     example.

     You can explore the endianness of your platform by unpacking
     a data structure packed in native format such as:

         print unpack("h*", pack("s2", 1, 2)), "\n";
         # '10002000' on e.g. Intel x86 or Alpha 21064 in little-endian mode
         # '00100020' on e.g. Motorola 68040

     If you need to distinguish between endian architectures you
     could use either of the variables set like so:

         $is_big_endian   = unpack("h*", pack("s", 1)) =~ /01/;
         $is_little_endian = unpack("h*", pack("s", 1)) =~ /^1/;

     Differing widths can cause truncation even between platforms
     of equal endianness.  The platform of shorter width loses
     the upper parts of the number.  There is no good solution
     for this problem except to avoid transferring or storing raw
     binary numbers.

     One can circumnavigate both these problems in two ways.
     Either transfer and store numbers always in text format,
     instead of raw binary, or else consider using modules like
     Data::Dumper (included in the standard distribution as of
     Perl 5.005) and Storable (included as of perl 5.8).  Keeping
     all data as text significantly simplifies matters.

     The v-strings are portable only up to v2147483647
     (0x7FFFFFFF), that's how far EBCDIC, or more precisely UTF-
     EBCDIC will go.





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  Files and Filesystems
     Most platforms these days structure files in a hierarchical
     fashion.  So, it is reasonably safe to assume that all
     platforms support the notion of a "path" to uniquely
     identify a file on the system.  How that path is really
     written, though, differs considerably.

     Although similar, file path specifications differ between
     Unix, Windows, Mac OS, OS/2, VMS, VOS, RISC OS, and probably
     others.  Unix, for example, is one of the few OSes that has
     the elegant idea of a single root directory.

     DOS, OS/2, VMS, VOS, and Windows can work similarly to Unix
     with "/" as path separator, or in their own idiosyncratic
     ways (such as having several root directories and various
     "unrooted" device files such NIL: and LPT:).

     Mac OS 9 and earlier used ":" as a path separator instead of
     "/".

     The filesystem may support neither hard links ("link") nor
     symbolic links ("symlink", "readlink", "lstat").

     The filesystem may support neither access timestamp nor
     change timestamp (meaning that about the only portable
     timestamp is the modification timestamp), or one second
     granularity of any timestamps (e.g. the FAT filesystem
     limits the time granularity to two seconds).

     The "inode change timestamp" (the "-C" filetest) may really
     be the "creation timestamp" (which it is not in Unix).

     VOS perl can emulate Unix filenames with "/" as path
     separator.  The native pathname characters greater-than,
     less-than, number-sign, and percent-sign are always
     accepted.

     RISC OS perl can emulate Unix filenames with "/" as path
     separator, or go native and use "." for path separator and
     ":" to signal filesystems and disk names.

     Don't assume Unix filesystem access semantics: that read,
     write, and execute are all the permissions there are, and
     even if they exist, that their semantics (for example what
     do r, w, and x mean on a directory) are the Unix ones.  The
     various Unix/POSIX compatibility layers usually try to make
     interfaces like chmod() work, but sometimes there simply is
     no good mapping.

     If all this is intimidating, have no (well, maybe only a
     little) fear.  There are modules that can help.  The
     File::Spec modules provide methods to do the Right Thing on



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     whatever platform happens to be running the program.

         use File::Spec::Functions;
         chdir(updir());        # go up one directory
         my $file = catfile(curdir(), 'temp', 'file.txt');
         # on Unix and Win32, './temp/file.txt'
         # on Mac OS Classic, ':temp:file.txt'
         # on VMS, '[.temp]file.txt'

     File::Spec is available in the standard distribution as of
     version 5.004_05.  File::Spec::Functions is only in
     File::Spec 0.7 and later, and some versions of perl come
     with version 0.6.  If File::Spec is not updated to 0.7 or
     later, you must use the object-oriented interface from
     File::Spec (or upgrade File::Spec).

     In general, production code should not have file paths
     hardcoded.  Making them user-supplied or read from a
     configuration file is better, keeping in mind that file path
     syntax varies on different machines.

     This is especially noticeable in scripts like Makefiles and
     test suites, which often assume "/" as a path separator for
     subdirectories.

     Also of use is File::Basename from the standard
     distribution, which splits a pathname into pieces (base
     filename, full path to directory, and file suffix).

     Even when on a single platform (if you can call Unix a
     single platform), remember not to count on the existence or
     the contents of particular system-specific files or
     directories, like /etc/passwd, /etc/sendmail.conf,
     /etc/resolv.conf, or even /tmp/.  For example, /etc/passwd
     may exist but not contain the encrypted passwords, because
     the system is using some form of enhanced security.  Or it
     may not contain all the accounts, because the system is
     using NIS.  If code does need to rely on such a file,
     include a description of the file and its format in the
     code's documentation, then make it easy for the user to
     override the default location of the file.

     Don't assume a text file will end with a newline.  They
     should, but people forget.

     Do not have two files or directories of the same name with
     different case, like test.pl and Test.pl, as many platforms
     have case-insensitive (or at least case-forgiving)
     filenames.  Also, try not to have non-word characters
     (except for ".") in the names, and keep them to the 8.3
     convention, for maximum portability, onerous a burden though
     this may appear.



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     Likewise, when using the AutoSplit module, try to keep your
     functions to 8.3 naming and case-insensitive conventions;
     or, at the least, make it so the resulting files have a
     unique (case-insensitively) first 8 characters.

     Whitespace in filenames is tolerated on most systems, but
     not all, and even on systems where it might be tolerated,
     some utilities might become confused by such whitespace.

     Many systems (DOS, VMS ODS-2) cannot have more than one "."
     in their filenames.

     Don't assume ">" won't be the first character of a filename.
     Always use "<" explicitly to open a file for reading, or
     even better, use the three-arg version of open, unless you
     want the user to be able to specify a pipe open.

         open my $fh, '<', $existing_file) or die $!;

     If filenames might use strange characters, it is safest to
     open it with "sysopen" instead of "open".  "open" is magic
     and can translate characters like ">", "<", and "|", which
     may be the wrong thing to do.  (Sometimes, though, it's the
     right thing.)  Three-arg open can also help protect against
     this translation in cases where it is undesirable.

     Don't use ":" as a part of a filename since many systems use
     that for their own semantics (Mac OS Classic for separating
     pathname components, many networking schemes and utilities
     for separating the nodename and the pathname, and so on).
     For the same reasons, avoid "@", ";" and "|".

     Don't assume that in pathnames you can collapse two leading
     slashes "//" into one: some networking and clustering
     filesystems have special semantics for that.  Let the
     operating system to sort it out.

     The portable filename characters as defined by ANSI C are

      a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r t u v w x y z
      A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R T U V W X Y Z
      0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
      . _ -

     and the "-" shouldn't be the first character.  If you want
     to be hypercorrect, stay case-insensitive and within the 8.3
     naming convention (all the files and directories have to be
     unique within one directory if their names are lowercased
     and truncated to eight characters before the ".", if any,
     and to three characters after the ".", if any).  (And do not
     use "."s in directory names.)




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  System Interaction
     Not all platforms provide a command line.  These are usually
     platforms that rely primarily on a Graphical User Interface
     (GUI) for user interaction.  A program requiring a command
     line interface might not work everywhere.  This is probably
     for the user of the program to deal with, so don't stay up
     late worrying about it.

     Some platforms can't delete or rename files held open by the
     system, this limitation may also apply to changing
     filesystem metainformation like file permissions or owners.
     Remember to "close" files when you are done with them.
     Don't "unlink" or "rename" an open file.  Don't "tie" or
     "open" a file already tied or opened; "untie" or "close" it
     first.

     Don't open the same file more than once at a time for
     writing, as some operating systems put mandatory locks on
     such files.

     Don't assume that write/modify permission on a directory
     gives the right to add or delete files/directories in that
     directory.  That is filesystem specific: in some filesystems
     you need write/modify permission also (or even just) in the
     file/directory itself.  In some filesystems (AFS, DFS) the
     permission to add/delete directory entries is a completely
     separate permission.

     Don't assume that a single "unlink" completely gets rid of
     the file: some filesystems (most notably the ones in VMS)
     have versioned filesystems, and unlink() removes only the
     most recent one (it doesn't remove all the versions because
     by default the native tools on those platforms remove just
     the most recent version, too).  The portable idiom to remove
     all the versions of a file is

         1 while unlink "file";

     This will terminate if the file is undeleteable for some
     reason (protected, not there, and so on).

     Don't count on a specific environment variable existing in
     %ENV.  Don't count on %ENV entries being case-sensitive, or
     even case-preserving.  Don't try to clear %ENV by saying
     "%ENV = ();", or, if you really have to, make it conditional
     on "$^O ne 'VMS'" since in VMS the %ENV table is much more
     than a per-process key-value string table.

     On VMS, some entries in the %ENV hash are dynamically
     created when their key is used on a read if they did not
     previously exist.  The values for $ENV{HOME}, $ENV{TERM},
     $ENV{HOME}, and $ENV{USER}, are known to be dynamically



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     generated.  The specific names that are dynamically
     generated may vary with the version of the C library on VMS,
     and more may exist than is documented.

     On VMS by default, changes to the %ENV hash are persistent
     after the process exits.  This can cause unintended issues.

     Don't count on signals or %SIG for anything.

     Don't count on filename globbing.  Use "opendir", "readdir",
     and "closedir" instead.

     Don't count on per-program environment variables, or per-
     program current directories.

     Don't count on specific values of $!, neither numeric nor
     especially the strings values. Users may switch their
     locales causing error messages to be translated into their
     languages.  If you can trust a POSIXish environment, you can
     portably use the symbols defined by the Errno module, like
     ENOENT.  And don't trust on the values of $!  at all except
     immediately after a failed system call.

  Command names versus file pathnames
     Don't assume that the name used to invoke a command or
     program with "system" or "exec" can also be used to test for
     the existence of the file that holds the executable code for
     that command or program.  First, many systems have
     "internal" commands that are built-in to the shell or OS and
     while these commands can be invoked, there is no
     corresponding file.  Second, some operating systems (e.g.,
     Cygwin, DJGPP, OS/2, and VOS) have required suffixes for
     executable files; these suffixes are generally permitted on
     the command name but are not required.  Thus, a command like
     "perl" might exist in a file named "perl", "perl.exe", or
     "perl.pm", depending on the operating system.  The variable
     "_exe" in the Config module holds the executable suffix, if
     any.  Third, the VMS port carefully sets up $^X and
     $Config{perlpath} so that no further processing is required.
     This is just as well, because the matching regular
     expression used below would then have to deal with a
     possible trailing version number in the VMS file name.

     To convert $^X to a file pathname, taking account of the
     requirements of the various operating system possibilities,
     say:

       use Config;
       my $thisperl = $^X;
       if ($^O ne 'VMS')
          {$thisperl .= $Config{_exe} unless $thisperl =~ m/$Config{_exe}$/i;}




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     To convert $Config{perlpath} to a file pathname, say:

       use Config;
       my $thisperl = $Config{perlpath};
       if ($^O ne 'VMS')
          {$thisperl .= $Config{_exe} unless $thisperl =~ m/$Config{_exe}$/i;}

  Networking
     Don't assume that you can reach the public Internet.

     Don't assume that there is only one way to get through
     firewalls to the public Internet.

     Don't assume that you can reach outside world through any
     other port than 80, or some web proxy.  ftp is blocked by
     many firewalls.

     Don't assume that you can send email by connecting to the
     local SMTP port.

     Don't assume that you can reach yourself or any node by the
     name 'localhost'.  The same goes for '127.0.0.1'.  You will
     have to try both.

     Don't assume that the host has only one network card, or
     that it can't bind to many virtual IP addresses.

     Don't assume a particular network device name.

     Don't assume a particular set of ioctl()s will work.

     Don't assume that you can ping hosts and get replies.

     Don't assume that any particular port (service) will
     respond.

     Don't assume that Sys::Hostname (or any other API or
     command) returns either a fully qualified hostname or a non-
     qualified hostname: it all depends on how the system had
     been configured.  Also remember that for things such as DHCP
     and NAT, the hostname you get back might not be very useful.

     All the above "don't":s may look daunting, and they are, but
     the key is to degrade gracefully if one cannot reach the
     particular network service one wants.  Croaking or hanging
     do not look very professional.

  Interprocess Communication (IPC)
     In general, don't directly access the system in code meant
     to be portable.  That means, no "system", "exec", "fork",
     "pipe", "``", "qx//", "open" with a "|", nor any of the
     other things that makes being a perl hacker worth being.



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     Commands that launch external processes are generally
     supported on most platforms (though many of them do not
     support any type of forking).  The problem with using them
     arises from what you invoke them on.  External tools are
     often named differently on different platforms, may not be
     available in the same location, might accept different
     arguments, can behave differently, and often present their
     results in a platform-dependent way.  Thus, you should
     seldom depend on them to produce consistent results. (Then
     again, if you're calling netstat -a, you probably don't
     expect it to run on both Unix and CP/M.)

     One especially common bit of Perl code is opening a pipe to
     sendmail:

         open(MAIL, '|/usr/lib/sendmail -t')
             or die "cannot fork sendmail: $!";

     This is fine for systems programming when sendmail is known
     to be available.  But it is not fine for many non-Unix
     systems, and even some Unix systems that may not have
     sendmail installed.  If a portable solution is needed, see
     the various distributions on CPAN that deal with it.
     Mail::Mailer and Mail::Send in the MailTools distribution
     are commonly used, and provide several mailing methods,
     including mail, sendmail, and direct SMTP (via Net::SMTP) if
     a mail transfer agent is not available.  Mail::Sendmail is a
     standalone module that provides simple, platform-independent
     mailing.

     The Unix System V IPC ("msg*(), sem*(), shm*()") is not
     available even on all Unix platforms.

     Do not use either the bare result of "pack("N", 10, 20, 30,
     40)" or bare v-strings (such as "v10.20.30.40") to represent
     IPv4 addresses: both forms just pack the four bytes into
     network order.  That this would be equal to the C language
     "in_addr" struct (which is what the socket code internally
     uses) is not guaranteed.  To be portable use the routines of
     the Socket extension, such as "inet_aton()", "inet_ntoa()",
     and "sockaddr_in()".

     The rule of thumb for portable code is: Do it all in
     portable Perl, or use a module (that may internally
     implement it with platform-specific code, but expose a
     common interface).

  External Subroutines (XS)
     XS code can usually be made to work with any platform, but
     dependent libraries, header files, etc., might not be
     readily available or portable, or the XS code itself might
     be platform-specific, just as Perl code might be.  If the



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     libraries and headers are portable, then it is normally
     reasonable to make sure the XS code is portable, too.

     A different type of portability issue arises when writing XS
     code: availability of a C compiler on the end-user's system.
     C brings with it its own portability issues, and writing XS
     code will expose you to some of those.  Writing purely in
     Perl is an easier way to achieve portability.

  Standard Modules
     In general, the standard modules work across platforms.
     Notable exceptions are the CPAN module (which currently
     makes connections to external programs that may not be
     available), platform-specific modules (like
     ExtUtils::MM_VMS), and DBM modules.

     There is no one DBM module available on all platforms.
     SDBM_File and the others are generally available on all Unix
     and DOSish ports, but not in MacPerl, where only NBDM_File
     and DB_File are available.

     The good news is that at least some DBM module should be
     available, and AnyDBM_File will use whichever module it can
     find.  Of course, then the code needs to be fairly strict,
     dropping to the greatest common factor (e.g., not exceeding
     1K for each record), so that it will work with any DBM
     module.  See AnyDBM_File for more details.

  Time and Date
     The system's notion of time of day and calendar date is
     controlled in widely different ways.  Don't assume the
     timezone is stored in $ENV{TZ}, and even if it is, don't
     assume that you can control the timezone through that
     variable.  Don't assume anything about the three-letter
     timezone abbreviations (for example that MST would be the
     Mountain Standard Time, it's been known to stand for Moscow
     Standard Time).  If you need to use timezones, express them
     in some unambiguous format like the exact number of minutes
     offset from UTC, or the POSIX timezone format.

     Don't assume that the epoch starts at 00:00:00, January 1,
     1970, because that is OS- and implementation-specific.  It
     is better to store a date in an unambiguous representation.
     The ISO 8601 standard defines YYYY-MM-DD as the date format,
     or YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SS (that's a literal "T" separating the
     date from the time).  Please do use the ISO 8601 instead of
     making us to guess what date 02/03/04 might be.  ISO 8601
     even sorts nicely as-is.  A text representation (like
     "1987-12-18") can be easily converted into an OS-specific
     value using a module like Date::Parse.  An array of values,
     such as those returned by "localtime", can be converted to
     an OS-specific representation using Time::Local.



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     When calculating specific times, such as for tests in time
     or date modules, it may be appropriate to calculate an
     offset for the epoch.

         require Time::Local;
         my $offset = Time::Local::timegm(0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 70);

     The value for $offset in Unix will be 0, but in Mac OS
     Classic will be some large number.  $offset can then be
     added to a Unix time value to get what should be the proper
     value on any system.

  Character sets and character encoding
     Assume very little about character sets.

     Assume nothing about numerical values ("ord", "chr") of
     characters.  Do not use explicit code point ranges (like
     \xHH-\xHH); use for example symbolic character classes like
     "[:print:]".

     Do not assume that the alphabetic characters are encoded
     contiguously (in the numeric sense).  There may be gaps.

     Do not assume anything about the ordering of the characters.
     The lowercase letters may come before or after the uppercase
     letters; the lowercase and uppercase may be interlaced so
     that both "a" and "A" come before "b"; the accented and
     other international characters may be interlaced so that ae
     comes before "b".

  Internationalisation
     If you may assume POSIX (a rather large assumption), you may
     read more about the POSIX locale system from perllocale.
     The locale system at least attempts to make things a little
     bit more portable, or at least more convenient and native-
     friendly for non-English users.  The system affects
     character sets and encoding, and date and time
     formatting--amongst other things.

     If you really want to be international, you should consider
     Unicode.  See perluniintro and perlunicode for more
     information.

     If you want to use non-ASCII bytes (outside the bytes
     0x00..0x7f) in the "source code" of your code, to be
     portable you have to be explicit about what bytes they are.
     Someone might for example be using your code under a UTF-8
     locale, in which case random native bytes might be illegal
     ("Malformed UTF-8 ...")  This means that for example
     embedding ISO 8859-1 bytes beyond 0x7f into your strings
     might cause trouble later.  If the bytes are native 8-bit
     bytes, you can use the "bytes" pragma.  If the bytes are in



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     a string (regular expression being a curious string), you
     can often also use the "\xHH" notation instead of embedding
     the bytes as-is.  (If you want to write your code in UTF-8,
     you can use the "utf8".) The "bytes" and "utf8" pragmata are
     available since Perl 5.6.0.

  System Resources
     If your code is destined for systems with severely
     constrained (or missing!) virtual memory systems then you
     want to be especially mindful of avoiding wasteful
     constructs such as:

         # NOTE: this is no longer "bad" in perl5.005
         for (0..10000000) {}                       # bad
         for (my $x = 0; $x <= 10000000; ++$x) {}   # good

         my @lines = <$very_large_file>;            # bad

         while (<$fh>) {$file .= $_}                # sometimes bad
         my $file = join('', <$fh>);                # better

     The last two constructs may appear unintuitive to most
     people.  The first repeatedly grows a string, whereas the
     second allocates a large chunk of memory in one go.  On some
     systems, the second is more efficient that the first.

  Security
     Most multi-user platforms provide basic levels of security,
     usually implemented at the filesystem level.  Some, however,
     unfortunately do not.  Thus the notion of user id, or "home"
     directory, or even the state of being logged-in, may be
     unrecognizable on many platforms.  If you write programs
     that are security-conscious, it is usually best to know what
     type of system you will be running under so that you can
     write code explicitly for that platform (or class of
     platforms).

     Don't assume the Unix filesystem access semantics: the
     operating system or the filesystem may be using some ACL
     systems, which are richer languages than the usual rwx.
     Even if the rwx exist, their semantics might be different.

     (From security viewpoint testing for permissions before
     attempting to do something is silly anyway: if one tries
     this, there is potential for race conditions. Someone or
     something might change the permissions between the
     permissions check and the actual operation.  Just try the
     operation.)

     Don't assume the Unix user and group semantics: especially,
     don't expect the $< and $> (or the $( and $)) to work for
     switching identities (or memberships).



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     Don't assume set-uid and set-gid semantics. (And even if you
     do, think twice: set-uid and set-gid are a known can of
     security worms.)

  Style
     For those times when it is necessary to have platform-
     specific code, consider keeping the platform-specific code
     in one place, making porting to other platforms easier.  Use
     the Config module and the special variable $^O to
     differentiate platforms, as described in "PLATFORMS".

     Be careful in the tests you supply with your module or
     programs.  Module code may be fully portable, but its tests
     might not be.  This often happens when tests spawn off other
     processes or call external programs to aid in the testing,
     or when (as noted above) the tests assume certain things
     about the filesystem and paths.  Be careful not to depend on
     a specific output style for errors, such as when checking $!
     after a failed system call.  Using $! for anything else than
     displaying it as output is doubtful (though see the Errno
     module for testing reasonably portably for error value).
     Some platforms expect a certain output format, and Perl on
     those platforms may have been adjusted accordingly.  Most
     specifically, don't anchor a regex when testing an error
     value.

CPAN Testers
     Modules uploaded to CPAN are tested by a variety of
     volunteers on different platforms.  These CPAN testers are
     notified by mail of each new upload, and reply to the list
     with PASS, FAIL, NA (not applicable to this platform), or
     UNKNOWN (unknown), along with any relevant notations.

     The purpose of the testing is twofold: one, to help
     developers fix any problems in their code that crop up
     because of lack of testing on other platforms; two, to
     provide users with information about whether a given module
     works on a given platform.

     Also see:

     o   Mailing list: cpan-testers@perl.org

     o   Testing results: http://testers.cpan.org/

PLATFORMS
     As of version 5.002, Perl is built with a $^O variable that
     indicates the operating system it was built on.  This was
     implemented to help speed up code that would otherwise have
     to "use Config" and use the value of $Config{osname}.  Of
     course, to get more detailed information about the system,
     looking into %Config is certainly recommended.



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     %Config cannot always be trusted, however, because it was
     built at compile time.  If perl was built in one place, then
     transferred elsewhere, some values may be wrong.  The values
     may even have been edited after the fact.

  Unix
     Perl works on a bewildering variety of Unix and Unix-like
     platforms (see e.g. most of the files in the hints/
     directory in the source code kit).  On most of these
     systems, the value of $^O (hence $Config{'osname'}, too) is
     determined either by lowercasing and stripping punctuation
     from the first field of the string returned by typing "uname
     -a" (or a similar command) at the shell prompt or by testing
     the file system for the presence of uniquely named files
     such as a kernel or header file.  Here, for example, are a
     few of the more popular Unix flavors:

         uname         $^O        $Config{'archname'}
         --------------------------------------------
         AIX           aix        aix
         BSD/OS        bsdos      i386-bsdos
         Darwin        darwin     darwin
         dgux          dgux       AViiON-dgux
         DYNIX/ptx     dynixptx   i386-dynixptx
         FreeBSD       freebsd    freebsd-i386
         Haiku         haiku      BePC-haiku
         Linux         linux      arm-linux
         Linux         linux      i386-linux
         Linux         linux      i586-linux
         Linux         linux      ppc-linux
         HP-UX         hpux       PA-RISC1.1
         IRIX          irix       irix
         Mac OS X      darwin     darwin
         NeXT 3        next       next-fat
         NeXT 4        next       OPENSTEP-Mach
         openbsd       openbsd    i386-openbsd
         OSF1          dec_osf    alpha-dec_osf
         reliantunix-n svr4       RM400-svr4
         SCO_SV        sco_sv     i386-sco_sv
         SINIX-N       svr4       RM400-svr4
         sn4609        unicos     CRAY_C90-unicos
         sn6521        unicosmk   t3e-unicosmk
         sn9617        unicos     CRAY_J90-unicos
         SunOS         solaris    sun4-solaris
         SunOS         solaris    i86pc-solaris
         SunOS4        sunos      sun4-sunos

     Because the value of $Config{archname} may depend on the
     hardware architecture, it can vary more than the value of
     $^O.





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  DOS and Derivatives
     Perl has long been ported to Intel-style microcomputers
     running under systems like PC-DOS, MS-DOS, OS/2, and most
     Windows platforms you can bring yourself to mention (except
     for Windows CE, if you count that).  Users familiar with
     COMMAND.COM or CMD.EXE style shells should be aware that
     each of these file specifications may have subtle
     differences:

         my $filespec0 = "c:/foo/bar/file.txt";
         my $filespec1 = "c:\\foo\\bar\\file.txt";
         my $filespec2 = 'c:\foo\bar\file.txt';
         my $filespec3 = 'c:\\foo\\bar\\file.txt';

     System calls accept either "/" or "\" as the path separator.
     However, many command-line utilities of DOS vintage treat
     "/" as the option prefix, so may get confused by filenames
     containing "/".  Aside from calling any external programs,
     "/" will work just fine, and probably better, as it is more
     consistent with popular usage, and avoids the problem of
     remembering what to backwhack and what not to.

     The DOS FAT filesystem can accommodate only "8.3" style
     filenames.  Under the "case-insensitive, but case-
     preserving" HPFS (OS/2) and NTFS (NT) filesystems you may
     have to be careful about case returned with functions like
     "readdir" or used with functions like "open" or "opendir".

     DOS also treats several filenames as special, such as AUX,
     PRN, NUL, CON, COM1, LPT1, LPT2, etc.  Unfortunately,
     sometimes these filenames won't even work if you include an
     explicit directory prefix.  It is best to avoid such
     filenames, if you want your code to be portable to DOS and
     its derivatives.  It's hard to know what these all are,
     unfortunately.

     Users of these operating systems may also wish to make use
     of scripts such as pl2bat.bat or pl2cmd to put wrappers
     around your scripts.

     Newline ("\n") is translated as "\015\012" by STDIO when
     reading from and writing to files (see "Newlines").
     "binmode(FILEHANDLE)" will keep "\n" translated as "\012"
     for that filehandle.  Since it is a no-op on other systems,
     "binmode" should be used for cross-platform code that deals
     with binary data.  That's assuming you realize in advance
     that your data is in binary.  General-purpose programs
     should often assume nothing about their data.

     The $^O variable and the $Config{archname} values for
     various DOSish perls are as follows:




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          OS            $^O      $Config{archname}   ID    Version
          --------------------------------------------------------
          MS-DOS        dos        ?
          PC-DOS        dos        ?
          OS/2          os2        ?
          Windows 3.1   ?          ?                 0      3 01
          Windows 95    MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       1      4 00
          Windows 98    MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       1      4 10
          Windows ME    MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       1      ?
          Windows NT    MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      4 xx
          Windows NT    MSWin32    MSWin32-ALPHA     2      4 xx
          Windows NT    MSWin32    MSWin32-ppc       2      4 xx
          Windows 2000  MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      5 00
          Windows XP    MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      5 01
          Windows 2003  MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      5 02
          Windows Vista MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      6 00
          Windows 7     MSWin32    MSWin32-x86       2      6 01
          Windows 7     MSWin32    MSWin32-x64       2      6 01
          Windows CE    MSWin32    ?                 3
          Cygwin        cygwin     cygwin

     The various MSWin32 Perl's can distinguish the OS they are
     running on via the value of the fifth element of the list
     returned from Win32::GetOSVersion().  For example:

         if ($^O eq 'MSWin32') {
             my @os_version_info = Win32::GetOSVersion();
             print +('3.1','95','NT')[$os_version_info[4]],"\n";
         }

     There are also Win32::IsWinNT() and Win32::IsWin95(), try
     "perldoc Win32", and as of libwin32 0.19 (not part of the
     core Perl distribution) Win32::GetOSName().  The very
     portable POSIX::uname() will work too:

         c:\> perl -MPOSIX -we "print join '|', uname"
         Windows NT|moonru|5.0|Build 2195 (Service Pack 2)|x86

     Also see:

     o   The djgpp environment for DOS,
         http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ and perldos.

     o   The EMX environment for DOS, OS/2, etc. emx@iaehv.nl,
         ftp://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/dev/emx/  Also perlos2.

     o   Build instructions for Win32 in perlwin32, or under the
         Cygnus environment in perlcygwin.

     o   The "Win32::*" modules in Win32.

     o   The ActiveState Pages, http://www.activestate.com/



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     o   The Cygwin environment for Win32; README.cygwin
         (installed as perlcygwin), http://www.cygwin.com/

     o   The U/WIN environment for Win32,
         http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/

     o   Build instructions for OS/2, perlos2

  VMS
     Perl on VMS is discussed in perlvms in the perl
     distribution.

     The official name of VMS as of this writing is OpenVMS.

     Perl on VMS can accept either VMS- or Unix-style file
     specifications as in either of the following:

         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" SYS$LOGIN:LOGIN.COM
         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" /sys$login/login.com

     but not a mixture of both as in:

         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" sys$login:/login.com
         Can't open sys$login:/login.com: file specification syntax error

     Interacting with Perl from the Digital Command Language
     (DCL) shell often requires a different set of quotation
     marks than Unix shells do.  For example:

         $ perl -e "print ""Hello, world.\n"""
         Hello, world.

     There are several ways to wrap your perl scripts in DCL .COM
     files, if you are so inclined.  For example:

         $ write sys$output "Hello from DCL!"
         $ if p1 .eqs. ""
         $ then perl -x 'f$environment("PROCEDURE")
         $ else perl -x - 'p1 'p2 'p3 'p4 'p5 'p6 'p7 'p8
         $ deck/dollars="__END__"
         #!/usr/bin/perl

         print "Hello from Perl!\n";

         __END__
         $ endif

     Do take care with "$ ASSIGN/nolog/user SYS$COMMAND:
     SYS$INPUT" if your perl-in-DCL script expects to do things
     like "$read = <STDIN>;".





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     The VMS operating system has two filesystems, known as ODS-2
     and ODS-5.

     For ODS-2, filenames are in the format
     "name.extension;version".  The maximum length for filenames
     is 39 characters, and the maximum length for extensions is
     also 39 characters.  Version is a number from 1 to 32767.
     Valid characters are "/[A-Z0-9$_-]/".

     The ODS-2 filesystem is case-insensitive and does not
     preserve case.  Perl simulates this by converting all
     filenames to lowercase internally.

     For ODS-5, filenames may have almost any character in them
     and can include Unicode characters.  Characters that could
     be misinterpreted by the DCL shell or file parsing utilities
     need to be prefixed with the "^" character, or replaced with
     hexadecimal characters prefixed with the "^" character.
     Such prefixing is only needed with the pathnames are in VMS
     format in applications.  Programs that can accept the Unix
     format of pathnames do not need the escape characters.  The
     maximum length for filenames is 255 characters.  The ODS-5
     file system can handle both a case preserved and a case
     sensitive mode.

     ODS-5 is only available on the OpenVMS for 64 bit platforms.

     Support for the extended file specifications is being done
     as optional settings to preserve backward compatibility with
     Perl scripts that assume the previous VMS limitations.

     In general routines on VMS that get a Unix format file
     specification should return it in a Unix format, and when
     they get a VMS format specification they should return a VMS
     format unless they are documented to do a conversion.

     For routines that generate return a file specification, VMS
     allows setting if the C library which Perl is built on if it
     will be returned in VMS format or in Unix format.

     With the ODS-2 file system, there is not much difference in
     syntax of filenames without paths for VMS or Unix.  With the
     extended character set available with ODS-5 there can be a
     significant difference.

     Because of this, existing Perl scripts written for VMS were
     sometimes treating VMS and Unix filenames interchangeably.
     Without the extended character set enabled, this behavior
     will mostly be maintained for backwards compatibility.

     When extended characters are enabled with ODS-5, the
     handling of Unix formatted file specifications is to that of



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     a Unix system.

     VMS file specifications without extensions have a trailing
     dot.  An equivalent Unix file specification should not show
     the trailing dot.

     The result of all of this, is that for VMS, for portable
     scripts, you can not depend on Perl to present the filenames
     in lowercase, to be case sensitive, and that the filenames
     could be returned in either Unix or VMS format.

     And if a routine returns a file specification, unless it is
     intended to convert it, it should return it in the same
     format as it found it.

     "readdir" by default has traditionally returned lowercased
     filenames.  When the ODS-5 support is enabled, it will
     return the exact case of the filename on the disk.

     Files without extensions have a trailing period on them, so
     doing a "readdir" in the default mode with a file named A.;5
     will return a. when VMS is (though that file could be opened
     with "open(FH, 'A')").

     With support for extended file specifications and if
     "opendir" was given a Unix format directory, a file named
     A.;5 will return a and optionally in the exact case on the
     disk.  When "opendir" is given a VMS format directory, then
     "readdir" should return a., and again with the optionally
     the exact case.

     RMS had an eight level limit on directory depths from any
     rooted logical (allowing 16 levels overall) prior to VMS
     7.2, and even with versions of VMS on VAX up through 7.3.
     Hence "PERL_ROOT:[LIB.2.3.4.5.6.7.8]" is a valid directory
     specification but "PERL_ROOT:[LIB.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9]" is not.
     Makefile.PL authors might have to take this into account,
     but at least they can refer to the former as
     "/PERL_ROOT/lib/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/".

     Pumpkings and module integrators can easily see whether
     files with too many directory levels have snuck into the
     core by running the following in the top-level source
     directory:

        $ perl -ne "$_=~s/\s+.*//; print if scalar(split /\//) > 8;" < MANIFEST

     The VMS::Filespec module, which gets installed as part of
     the build process on VMS, is a pure Perl module that can
     easily be installed on non-VMS platforms and can be helpful
     for conversions to and from RMS native formats.  It is also
     now the only way that you should check to see if VMS is in a



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     case sensitive mode.

     What "\n" represents depends on the type of file opened.  It
     usually represents "\012" but it could also be "\015",
     "\012", "\015\012", "\000", "\040", or nothing depending on
     the file organization and record format.  The VMS::Stdio
     module provides access to the special fopen() requirements
     of files with unusual attributes on VMS.

     TCP/IP stacks are optional on VMS, so socket routines might
     not be implemented.  UDP sockets may not be supported.

     The TCP/IP library support for all current versions of VMS
     is dynamically loaded if present, so even if the routines
     are configured, they may return a status indicating that
     they are not implemented.

     The value of $^O on OpenVMS is "VMS".  To determine the
     architecture that you are running on without resorting to
     loading all of %Config you can examine the content of the
     @INC array like so:

         if (grep(/VMS_AXP/, @INC)) {
             print "I'm on Alpha!\n";

         } elsif (grep(/VMS_VAX/, @INC)) {
             print "I'm on VAX!\n";

         } elsif (grep(/VMS_IA64/, @INC)) {
             print "I'm on IA64!\n";

         } else {
             print "I'm not so sure about where $^O is...\n";
         }

     In general, the significant differences should only be if
     Perl is running on VMS_VAX or one of the 64 bit OpenVMS
     platforms.

     On VMS, perl determines the UTC offset from the
     "SYS$TIMEZONE_DIFFERENTIAL" logical name.  Although the VMS
     epoch began at 17-NOV-1858 00:00:00.00, calls to "localtime"
     are adjusted to count offsets from 01-JAN-1970 00:00:00.00,
     just like Unix.

     Also see:

     o   README.vms (installed as README_vms), perlvms

     o   vmsperl list, vmsperl-subscribe@perl.org

     o   vmsperl on the web,



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         http://www.sidhe.org/vmsperl/index.html

  VOS
     Perl on VOS (also known as OpenVOS) is discussed in
     README.vos in the perl distribution (installed as perlvos).
     Perl on VOS can accept either VOS- or Unix-style file
     specifications as in either of the following:

         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" >system>notices
         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" /system/notices

     or even a mixture of both as in:

         $ perl -ne "print if /perl_setup/i" >system/notices

     Even though VOS allows the slash character to appear in
     object names, because the VOS port of Perl interprets it as
     a pathname delimiting character, VOS files, directories, or
     links whose names contain a slash character cannot be
     processed.  Such files must be renamed before they can be
     processed by Perl.

     Older releases of VOS (prior to OpenVOS Release 17.0) limit
     file names to 32 or fewer characters, prohibit file names
     from starting with a "-" character, and prohibit file names
     from containing any character matching "tr/
     !#%&'()*;<=>?//".

     Newer releases of VOS (OpenVOS Release 17.0 or later)
     support a feature known as extended names.  On these
     releases, file names can contain up to 255 characters, are
     prohibited from starting with a "-" character, and the set
     of prohibited characters is reduced to any character
     matching "tr/#%*<>?//".  There are restrictions involving
     spaces and apostrophies:  these characters must not begin or
     end a name, nor can they immediately precede or follow a
     period.  Additionally, a space must not immediately precede
     another space or hyphen.  Specifically, the following
     character combinations are prohibited:  space-space, space-
     hyphen, period-space, space-period, period-apostrophe,
     apostrophe-period, leading or trailing space, and leading or
     trailing apostrophe.  Although an extended file name is
     limited to 255 characters, a path name is still limited to
     256 characters.

     The value of $^O on VOS is "VOS".  To determine the
     architecture that you are running on without resorting to
     loading all of %Config you can examine the content of the
     @INC array like so:






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         if ($^O =~ /VOS/) {
             print "I'm on a Stratus box!\n";
         } else {
             print "I'm not on a Stratus box!\n";
             die;
         }

     Also see:

     o   README.vos (installed as perlvos)

     o   The VOS mailing list.

         There is no specific mailing list for Perl on VOS.  You
         can post comments to the comp.sys.stratus newsgroup, or
         use the contact information located in the distribution
         files on the Stratus Anonymous FTP site.

     o   VOS Perl on the web at
         http://ftp.stratus.com/pub/vos/posix/posix.html

  EBCDIC Platforms
     Recent versions of Perl have been ported to platforms such
     as OS/400 on AS/400 minicomputers as well as OS/390, VM/ESA,
     and BS2000 for S/390 Mainframes.  Such computers use EBCDIC
     character sets internally (usually Character Code Set ID
     0037 for OS/400 and either 1047 or POSIX-BC for S/390
     systems).  On the mainframe perl currently works under the
     "Unix system services for OS/390" (formerly known as
     OpenEdition), VM/ESA OpenEdition, or the BS200 POSIX-BC
     system (BS2000 is supported in perl 5.6 and greater).  See
     perlos390 for details.  Note that for OS/400 there is also a
     port of Perl 5.8.1/5.9.0 or later to the PASE which is
     ASCII-based (as opposed to ILE which is EBCDIC-based), see
     perlos400.

     As of R2.5 of USS for OS/390 and Version 2.3 of VM/ESA these
     Unix sub-systems do not support the "#!" shebang trick for
     script invocation.  Hence, on OS/390 and VM/ESA perl scripts
     can be executed with a header similar to the following
     simple script:

         : # use perl
             eval 'exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
                 if 0;
         #!/usr/local/bin/perl     # just a comment really

         print "Hello from perl!\n";

     OS/390 will support the "#!" shebang trick in release 2.8
     and beyond.  Calls to "system" and backticks can use POSIX
     shell syntax on all S/390 systems.



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     On the AS/400, if PERL5 is in your library list, you may
     need to wrap your perl scripts in a CL procedure to invoke
     them like so:

         BEGIN
           CALL PGM(PERL5/PERL) PARM('/QOpenSys/hello.pl')
         ENDPGM

     This will invoke the perl script hello.pl in the root of the
     QOpenSys file system.  On the AS/400 calls to "system" or
     backticks must use CL syntax.

     On these platforms, bear in mind that the EBCDIC character
     set may have an effect on what happens with some perl
     functions (such as "chr", "pack", "print", "printf", "ord",
     "sort", "sprintf", "unpack"), as well as bit-fiddling with
     ASCII constants using operators like "^", "&" and "|", not
     to mention dealing with socket interfaces to ASCII computers
     (see "Newlines").

     Fortunately, most web servers for the mainframe will
     correctly translate the "\n" in the following statement to
     its ASCII equivalent ("\r" is the same under both Unix and
     OS/390 & VM/ESA):

         print "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n";

     The values of $^O on some of these platforms includes:

         uname         $^O        $Config{'archname'}
         --------------------------------------------
         OS/390        os390      os390
         OS400         os400      os400
         POSIX-BC      posix-bc   BS2000-posix-bc
         VM/ESA        vmesa      vmesa

     Some simple tricks for determining if you are running on an
     EBCDIC platform could include any of the following (perhaps
     all):

         if ("\t" eq "\05")   { print "EBCDIC may be spoken here!\n"; }

         if (ord('A') == 193) { print "EBCDIC may be spoken here!\n"; }

         if (chr(169) eq 'z') { print "EBCDIC may be spoken here!\n"; }

     One thing you may not want to rely on is the EBCDIC encoding
     of punctuation characters since these may differ from code
     page to code page (and once your module or script is
     rumoured to work with EBCDIC, folks will want it to work
     with all EBCDIC character sets).




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     Also see:

     o   perlos390, README.os390, perlbs2000, README.vmesa,
         perlebcdic.

     o   The perl-mvs@perl.org list is for discussion of porting
         issues as well as general usage issues for all EBCDIC
         Perls.  Send a message body of "subscribe perl-mvs" to
         majordomo@perl.org.

     o   AS/400 Perl information at
         http://as400.rochester.ibm.com/ as well as on CPAN in
         the ports/ directory.

  Acorn RISC OS
     Because Acorns use ASCII with newlines ("\n") in text files
     as "\012" like Unix, and because Unix filename emulation is
     turned on by default, most simple scripts will probably work
     "out of the box".  The native filesystem is modular, and
     individual filesystems are free to be case-sensitive or
     insensitive, and are usually case-preserving.  Some native
     filesystems have name length limits, which file and
     directory names are silently truncated to fit.  Scripts
     should be aware that the standard filesystem currently has a
     name length limit of 10 characters, with up to 77 items in a
     directory, but other filesystems may not impose such
     limitations.

     Native filenames are of the form

         Filesystem#Special_Field::DiskName.$.Directory.Directory.File

     where

         Special_Field is not usually present, but may contain . and $ .
         Filesystem =~ m|[A-Za-z0-9_]|
         DsicName   =~ m|[A-Za-z0-9_/]|
         $ represents the root directory
         . is the path separator
         @ is the current directory (per filesystem but machine global)
         ^ is the parent directory
         Directory and File =~ m|[^\0- "\.\$\%\&:\@\\^\|\177]+|

     The default filename translation is roughly "tr|/.|./|;"

     Note that ""ADFS::HardDisk.$.File" ne
     'ADFS::HardDisk.$.File'" and that the second stage of "$"
     interpolation in regular expressions will fall foul of the
     $. if scripts are not careful.

     Logical paths specified by system variables containing
     comma-separated search lists are also allowed; hence



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     "System:Modules" is a valid filename, and the filesystem
     will prefix "Modules" with each section of "System$Path"
     until a name is made that points to an object on disk.
     Writing to a new file "System:Modules" would be allowed only
     if "System$Path" contains a single item list.  The
     filesystem will also expand system variables in filenames if
     enclosed in angle brackets, so "<System$Dir>.Modules" would
     look for the file "$ENV{'System$Dir'} . 'Modules'".  The
     obvious implication of this is that fully qualified
     filenames can start with "<>" and should be protected when
     "open" is used for input.

     Because "." was in use as a directory separator and
     filenames could not be assumed to be unique after 10
     characters, Acorn implemented the C compiler to strip the
     trailing ".c" ".h" ".s" and ".o" suffix from filenames
     specified in source code and store the respective files in
     subdirectories named after the suffix.  Hence files are
     translated:

         foo.h           h.foo
         C:foo.h         C:h.foo        (logical path variable)
         sys/os.h        sys.h.os       (C compiler groks Unix-speak)
         10charname.c    c.10charname
         10charname.o    o.10charname
         11charname_.c   c.11charname   (assuming filesystem truncates at 10)

     The Unix emulation library's translation of filenames to
     native assumes that this sort of translation is required,
     and it allows a user-defined list of known suffixes that it
     will transpose in this fashion.  This may seem transparent,
     but consider that with these rules "foo/bar/baz.h" and
     "foo/bar/h/baz" both map to "foo.bar.h.baz", and that
     "readdir" and "glob" cannot and do not attempt to emulate
     the reverse mapping.  Other "."'s in filenames are
     translated to "/".

     As implied above, the environment accessed through %ENV is
     global, and the convention is that program specific
     environment variables are of the form "Program$Name".  Each
     filesystem maintains a current directory, and the current
     filesystem's current directory is the global current
     directory.  Consequently, sociable programs don't change the
     current directory but rely on full pathnames, and programs
     (and Makefiles) cannot assume that they can spawn a child
     process which can change the current directory without
     affecting its parent (and everyone else for that matter).

     Because native operating system filehandles are global and
     are currently allocated down from 255, with 0 being a
     reserved value, the Unix emulation library emulates Unix
     filehandles.  Consequently, you can't rely on passing



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     "STDIN", "STDOUT", or "STDERR" to your children.

     The desire of users to express filenames of the form
     "<Foo$Dir>.Bar" on the command line unquoted causes
     problems, too: "``" command output capture has to perform a
     guessing game.  It assumes that a string "<[^<>]+\$[^<>]>"
     is a reference to an environment variable, whereas anything
     else involving "<" or ">" is redirection, and generally
     manages to be 99% right.  Of course, the problem remains
     that scripts cannot rely on any Unix tools being available,
     or that any tools found have Unix-like command line
     arguments.

     Extensions and XS are, in theory, buildable by anyone using
     free tools.  In practice, many don't, as users of the Acorn
     platform are used to binary distributions.  MakeMaker does
     run, but no available make currently copes with MakeMaker's
     makefiles; even if and when this should be fixed, the lack
     of a Unix-like shell will cause problems with makefile
     rules, especially lines of the form "cd sdbm && make all",
     and anything using quoting.

     "RISC OS" is the proper name for the operating system, but
     the value in $^O is "riscos" (because we don't like
     shouting).

  Other perls
     Perl has been ported to many platforms that do not fit into
     any of the categories listed above.  Some, such as AmigaOS,
     BeOS, HP MPE/iX, QNX, Plan 9, and VOS, have been well-
     integrated into the standard Perl source code kit.  You may
     need to see the ports/ directory on CPAN for information,
     and possibly binaries, for the likes of: aos, Atari ST,
     lynxos, riscos, Novell Netware, Tandem Guardian, etc.  (Yes,
     we know that some of these OSes may fall under the Unix
     category, but we are not a standards body.)

     Some approximate operating system names and their $^O values
     in the "OTHER" category include:

         OS            $^O        $Config{'archname'}
         ------------------------------------------
         Amiga DOS     amigaos    m68k-amigos
         BeOS          beos
         MPE/iX        mpeix      PA-RISC1.1

     See also:

     o   Amiga, README.amiga (installed as perlamiga).

     o   Be OS, README.beos




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     o   HP 300 MPE/iX, README.mpeix and Mark Bixby's web page
         http://www.bixby.org/mark/porting.html

     o   A free perl5-based PERL.NLM for Novell Netware is
         available in precompiled binary and source code form
         from http://www.novell.com/ as well as from CPAN.

     o   Plan 9, README.plan9

FUNCTION IMPLEMENTATIONS
     Listed below are functions that are either completely
     unimplemented or else have been implemented differently on
     various platforms.  Following each description will be, in
     parentheses, a list of platforms that the description
     applies to.

     The list may well be incomplete, or even wrong in some
     places.  When in doubt, consult the platform-specific README
     files in the Perl source distribution, and any other
     documentation resources accompanying a given port.

     Be aware, moreover, that even among Unix-ish systems there
     are variations.

     For many functions, you can also query %Config, exported by
     default from the Config module.  For example, to check
     whether the platform has the "lstat" call, check
     $Config{d_lstat}.  See Config for a full description of
     available variables.

  Alphabetical Listing of Perl Functions
     -X      "-w" only inspects the read-only file attribute
             (FILE_ATTRIBUTE_READONLY), which determines whether
             the directory can be deleted, not whether it can be
             written to. Directories always have read and write
             access unless denied by discretionary access control
             lists (DACLs).  (Win32)

             "-r", "-w", "-x", and "-o" tell whether the file is
             accessible, which may not reflect UIC-based file
             protections.  (VMS)

             "-s" by name on an open file will return the space
             reserved on disk, rather than the current extent.
             "-s" on an open filehandle returns the current size.
             (RISC OS)

             "-R", "-W", "-X", "-O" are indistinguishable from
             "-r", "-w", "-x", "-o". (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

             "-g", "-k", "-l", "-u", "-A" are not particularly
             meaningful.  (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)



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             "-p" is not particularly meaningful. (VMS, RISC OS)

             "-d" is true if passed a device spec without an
             explicit directory.  (VMS)

             "-x" (or "-X") determine if a file ends in one of
             the executable suffixes.  "-S" is meaningless.
             (Win32)

             "-x" (or "-X") determine if a file has an executable
             file type.  (RISC OS)

     alarm   Emulated using timers that must be explicitly polled
             whenever Perl wants to dispatch "safe signals" and
             therefore cannot interrupt blocking system calls.
             (Win32)

     atan2   Due to issues with various CPUs, math libraries,
             compilers, and standards, results for "atan2()" may
             vary depending on any combination of the above.
             Perl attempts to conform to the Open Group/IEEE
             standards for the results returned from "atan2()",
             but cannot force the issue if the system Perl is run
             on does not allow it.  (Tru64, HP-UX 10.20)

             The current version of the standards for "atan2()"
             is available at
             <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/atan2.html>.

     binmode Meaningless.  (RISC OS)

             Reopens file and restores pointer; if function
             fails, underlying filehandle may be closed, or
             pointer may be in a different position.  (VMS)

             The value returned by "tell" may be affected after
             the call, and the filehandle may be flushed. (Win32)

     chmod   Only good for changing "owner" read-write access,
             "group", and "other" bits are meaningless. (Win32)

             Only good for changing "owner" and "other" read-
             write access. (RISC OS)

             Access permissions are mapped onto VOS access-
             control list changes. (VOS)

             The actual permissions set depend on the value of
             the "CYGWIN" in the SYSTEM environment settings.
             (Cygwin)

     chown   Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9, RISC OS)



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             Does nothing, but won't fail. (Win32)

             A little funky, because VOS's notion of ownership is
             a little funky (VOS).

     chroot  Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, Plan 9, RISC OS, VOS,
             VM/ESA)

     crypt   May not be available if library or source was not
             provided when building perl. (Win32)

     dbmclose
             Not implemented. (VMS, Plan 9, VOS)

     dbmopen Not implemented. (VMS, Plan 9, VOS)

     dump    Not useful. (RISC OS)

             Not supported. (Cygwin, Win32)

             Invokes VMS debugger. (VMS)

     exec    Implemented via Spawn. (VM/ESA)

             Does not automatically flush output handles on some
             platforms.  (SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX)

     exit    Emulates Unix exit() (which considers "exit 1" to
             indicate an error) by mapping the 1 to SS$_ABORT
             (44).  This behavior may be overridden with the
             pragma "use vmsish 'exit'".  As with the CRTL's
             exit() function, "exit 0" is also mapped to an exit
             status of SS$_NORMAL (1); this mapping cannot be
             overridden.  Any other argument to exit() is used
             directly as Perl's exit status.  On VMS, unless the
             future POSIX_EXIT mode is enabled, the exit code
             should always be a valid VMS exit code and not a
             generic number.  When the POSIX_EXIT mode is
             enabled, a generic number will be encoded in a
             method compatible with the C library _POSIX_EXIT
             macro so that it can be decoded by other programs,
             particularly ones written in C, like the GNV
             package.  (VMS)

     fcntl   Not implemented. (Win32) Some functions available
             based on the version of VMS. (VMS)

     flock   Not implemented (VMS, RISC OS, VOS).

             Available only on Windows NT (not on Windows 95).
             (Win32)




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     fork    Not implemented. (AmigaOS, RISC OS, VM/ESA, VMS)

             Emulated using multiple interpreters.  See perlfork.
             (Win32)

             Does not automatically flush output handles on some
             platforms.  (SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX)

     getlogin
             Not implemented. (RISC OS)

     getpgrp Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

     getppid Not implemented. (Win32, RISC OS)

     getpriority
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS, VOS, VM/ESA)

     getpwnam
             Not implemented. (Win32)

             Not useful. (RISC OS)

     getgrnam
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

     getnetbyname
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     getpwuid
             Not implemented. (Win32)

             Not useful. (RISC OS)

     getgrgid
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

     getnetbyaddr
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     getprotobynumber
     getservbyport
     getpwent
             Not implemented. (Win32, VM/ESA)

     getgrent
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, VM/ESA)

     gethostbyname
             "gethostbyname('localhost')" does not work
             everywhere: you may have to use
             "gethostbyname('127.0.0.1')". (Irix 5)



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     gethostent
             Not implemented. (Win32)

     getnetent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     getprotoent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     getservent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     sethostent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9, RISC OS)

     setnetent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9, RISC OS)

     setprotoent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9, RISC OS)

     setservent
             Not implemented. (Plan 9, Win32, RISC OS)

     endpwent
             Not implemented. (MPE/iX, VM/ESA, Win32)

     endgrent
             Not implemented. (MPE/iX, RISC OS, VM/ESA, VMS,
             Win32)

     endhostent
             Not implemented. (Win32)

     endnetent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     endprotoent
             Not implemented. (Win32, Plan 9)

     endservent
             Not implemented. (Plan 9, Win32)

     getsockopt SOCKET,LEVEL,OPTNAME
             Not implemented. (Plan 9)

     glob    This operator is implemented via the File::Glob
             extension on most platforms.  See File::Glob for
             portability information.

     gmtime  In theory, gmtime() is reliable from -2**63 to
             2**63-1.  However, because work arounds in the



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             implementation use floating point numbers, it will
             become inaccurate as the time gets larger.  This is
             a bug and will be fixed in the future.

             On VOS, time values are 32-bit quantities.

     ioctl FILEHANDLE,FUNCTION,SCALAR
             Not implemented. (VMS)

             Available only for socket handles, and it does what
             the ioctlsocket() call in the Winsock API does.
             (Win32)

             Available only for socket handles. (RISC OS)

     kill    Not implemented, hence not useful for taint
             checking. (RISC OS)

             "kill()" doesn't have the semantics of "raise()",
             i.e. it doesn't send a signal to the identified
             process like it does on Unix platforms.  Instead
             "kill($sig, $pid)" terminates the process identified
             by $pid, and makes it exit immediately with exit
             status $sig.  As in Unix, if $sig is 0 and the
             specified process exists, it returns true without
             actually terminating it. (Win32)

             "kill(-9, $pid)" will terminate the process
             specified by $pid and recursively all child
             processes owned by it.  This is different from the
             Unix semantics, where the signal will be delivered
             to all processes in the same process group as the
             process specified by $pid. (Win32)

             Is not supported for process identification number
             of 0 or negative numbers. (VMS)

     link    Not implemented. (MPE/iX, RISC OS, VOS)

             Link count not updated because hard links are not
             quite that hard (They are sort of half-way between
             hard and soft links). (AmigaOS)

             Hard links are implemented on Win32 under NTFS only.
             They are natively supported on Windows 2000 and
             later.  On Windows NT they are implemented using the
             Windows POSIX subsystem support and the Perl process
             will need Administrator or Backup Operator
             privileges to create hard links.

             Available on 64 bit OpenVMS 8.2 and later.  (VMS)




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     localtime
             localtime() has the same range as gmtime, but
             because time zone rules change its accuracy for
             historical and future times may degrade but usually
             by no more than an hour.

     lstat   Not implemented. (RISC OS)

             Return values (especially for device and inode) may
             be bogus. (Win32)

     msgctl
     msgget
     msgsnd
     msgrcv  Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, Plan 9, RISC OS, VOS)

     open    open to "|-" and "-|" are unsupported. (Win32,
             RISC OS)

             Opening a process does not automatically flush
             output handles on some platforms.  (SunOS, Solaris,
             HP-UX)

     readlink
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

     rename  Can't move directories between directories on
             different logical volumes. (Win32)

     select  Only implemented on sockets. (Win32, VMS)

             Only reliable on sockets. (RISC OS)

             Note that the "select FILEHANDLE" form is generally
             portable.

     semctl
     semget
     semop   Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS)

     setgrent
             Not implemented. (MPE/iX, VMS, Win32, RISC OS)

     setpgrp Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS, VOS)

     setpriority
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS, VOS)

     setpwent
             Not implemented. (MPE/iX, Win32, RISC OS)

     setsockopt



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             Not implemented. (Plan 9)

     shmctl
     shmget
     shmread
     shmwrite
             Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS, VOS)

     sockatmark
             A relatively recent addition to socket functions,
             may not be implemented even in Unix platforms.

     socketpair
             Not implemented. (RISC OS, VM/ESA)

             Available on OpenVOS Release 17.0 or later. (VOS)

             Available on 64 bit OpenVMS 8.2 and later.  (VMS)

     stat    Platforms that do not have rdev, blksize, or blocks
             will return these as '', so numeric comparison or
             manipulation of these fields may cause 'not numeric'
             warnings.

             ctime not supported on UFS (Mac OS X).

             ctime is creation time instead of inode change time
             (Win32).

             device and inode are not meaningful.  (Win32)

             device and inode are not necessarily reliable.
             (VMS)

             mtime, atime and ctime all return the last
             modification time.  Device and inode are not
             necessarily reliable.  (RISC OS)

             dev, rdev, blksize, and blocks are not available.
             inode is not meaningful and will differ between stat
             calls on the same file.  (os2)

             some versions of cygwin when doing a stat("foo") and
             if not finding it may then attempt to
             stat("foo.exe") (Cygwin)

             On Win32 stat() needs to open the file to determine
             the link count and update attributes that may have
             been changed through hard links.  Setting
             ${^WIN32_SLOPPY_STAT} to a true value speeds up
             stat() by not performing this operation. (Win32)




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     symlink Not implemented. (Win32, RISC OS)

             Implemented on 64 bit VMS 8.3.  VMS requires the
             symbolic link to be in Unix syntax if it is intended
             to resolve to a valid path.

     syscall Not implemented. (Win32, VMS, RISC OS, VOS, VM/ESA)

     sysopen The traditional "0", "1", and "2" MODEs are
             implemented with different numeric values on some
             systems.  The flags exported by "Fcntl" (O_RDONLY,
             O_WRONLY, O_RDWR) should work everywhere though.
             (Mac OS, OS/390, VM/ESA)

     system  As an optimization, may not call the command shell
             specified in $ENV{PERL5SHELL}.  "system(1, @args)"
             spawns an external process and immediately returns
             its process designator, without waiting for it to
             terminate.  Return value may be used subsequently in
             "wait" or "waitpid".  Failure to spawn() a
             subprocess is indicated by setting $? to "255 << 8".
             $? is set in a way compatible with Unix (i.e. the
             exitstatus of the subprocess is obtained by "$? >>
             8", as described in the documentation).  (Win32)

             There is no shell to process metacharacters, and the
             native standard is to pass a command line terminated
             by "\n" "\r" or "\0" to the spawned program.
             Redirection such as "> foo" is performed (if at all)
             by the run time library of the spawned program.
             "system" list will call the Unix emulation library's
             "exec" emulation, which attempts to provide
             emulation of the stdin, stdout, stderr in force in
             the parent, providing the child program uses a
             compatible version of the emulation library.  scalar
             will call the native command line direct and no such
             emulation of a child Unix program will exists.
             Mileage will vary.  (RISC OS)

             Does not automatically flush output handles on some
             platforms.  (SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX)

             The return value is POSIX-like (shifted up by 8
             bits), which only allows room for a made-up value
             derived from the severity bits of the native 32-bit
             condition code (unless overridden by "use vmsish
             'status'").  If the native condition code is one
             that has a POSIX value encoded, the POSIX value will
             be decoded to extract the expected exit value.  For
             more details see "$?" in perlvms. (VMS)

     times   "cumulative" times will be bogus.  On anything other



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             than Windows NT or Windows 2000, "system" time will
             be bogus, and "user" time is actually the time
             returned by the clock() function in the C runtime
             library. (Win32)

             Not useful. (RISC OS)

     truncate
             Not implemented. (Older versions of VMS)

             Truncation to same-or-shorter lengths only. (VOS)

             If a FILEHANDLE is supplied, it must be writable and
             opened in append mode (i.e., use "open(FH,
             '>>filename')" or "sysopen(FH,...,O_APPEND|O_RDWR)".
             If a filename is supplied, it should not be held
             open elsewhere. (Win32)

     umask   Returns undef where unavailable, as of version
             5.005.

             "umask" works but the correct permissions are set
             only when the file is finally closed. (AmigaOS)

     utime   Only the modification time is updated. (BeOS, VMS,
             RISC OS)

             May not behave as expected.  Behavior depends on the
             C runtime library's implementation of utime(), and
             the filesystem being used.  The FAT filesystem
             typically does not support an "access time" field,
             and it may limit timestamps to a granularity of two
             seconds. (Win32)

     wait
     waitpid Can only be applied to process handles returned for
             processes spawned using "system(1, ...)" or pseudo
             processes created with "fork()". (Win32)

             Not useful. (RISC OS)

Supported Platforms
     The following platforms are known to build Perl 5.12 (as of
     April 2010, its release date) from the standard source code
     distribution available at http://www.cpan.org/src

     Linux (x86, ARM, IA64)
     HP-UX
     AIX
     Win32
         Windows 2000
         Windows XP



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         Windows Server 2003
         Windows Vista
         Windows Server 2008
         Windows 7
     Cygwin
     Solaris (x86, SPARC)
     OpenVMS
         Alpha (7.2 and later)
         I64 (8.2 and later)
     Symbian
     NetBSD
     FreeBSD
     Haiku
     Irix (6.5. What else?)
     OpenBSD
     Dragonfly BSD
     MirOS BSD
         Caveats:

         time_t issues that may or may not be fixed
     Symbian (Series 60 v3, 3.2 and 5 - what else?)
     Stratus VOS / OpenVOS
     AIX

EOL Platforms (Perl 5.12)
     The following platforms were supported by a previous version
     of Perl but have been officially removed from Perl's source
     code as of 5.12:

     Atari MiNT
     Apollo Domain/OS
     Apple Mac OS 8/9
     Tenon Machten

     The following platforms may still work as of Perl 5.12, but
     Perl's developers have made an explicit decision to
     discontinue support for them:

     Windows 95
     Windows 98
     Windows ME
     Windows NT4

Supported Platforms (Perl 5.8)
     As of July 2002 (the Perl release 5.8.0), the following
     platforms were able to build Perl from the standard source
     code distribution available at http://www.cpan.org/src/








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             AIX
             BeOS
             BSD/OS          (BSDi)
             Cygwin
             DG/UX
             DOS DJGPP       1)
             DYNIX/ptx
             EPOC R5
             FreeBSD
             HI-UXMPP        (Hitachi) (5.8.0 worked but we didn't know it)
             HP-UX
             IRIX
             Linux
             Mac OS Classic
             Mac OS X        (Darwin)
             MPE/iX
             NetBSD
             NetWare
             NonStop-UX
             ReliantUNIX     (formerly SINIX)
             OpenBSD
             OpenVMS         (formerly VMS)
             Open UNIX       (Unixware) (since Perl 5.8.1/5.9.0)
             OS/2
             OS/400          (using the PASE) (since Perl 5.8.1/5.9.0)
             PowerUX
             POSIX-BC        (formerly BS2000)
             QNX
             Solaris
             SunOS 4
             SUPER-UX        (NEC)
             Tru64 UNIX      (formerly DEC OSF/1, Digital UNIX)
             UNICOS
             UNICOS/mk
             UTS
             VOS
             Win95/98/ME/2K/XP 2)
             WinCE
             z/OS            (formerly OS/390)
             VM/ESA

             1) in DOS mode either the DOS or OS/2 ports can be used
             2) compilers: Borland, MinGW (GCC), VC6

     The following platforms worked with the previous releases
     (5.6 and 5.7), but we did not manage either to fix or to
     test these in time for the 5.8.0 release.  There is a very
     good chance that many of these will work fine with the
     5.8.0.






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             BSD/OS
             DomainOS
             Hurd
             LynxOS
             MachTen
             PowerMAX
             SCO SV
             SVR4
             Unixware
             Windows 3.1

     Known to be broken for 5.8.0 (but 5.6.1 and 5.7.2 can be
     used):

             AmigaOS

     The following platforms have been known to build Perl from
     source in the past (5.005_03 and earlier), but we haven't
     been able to verify their status for the current release,
     either because the hardware/software platforms are rare or
     because we don't have an active champion on these
     platforms--or both.  They used to work, though, so go ahead
     and try compiling them, and let perlbug@perl.org of any
     trouble.

             3b1
             A/UX
             ConvexOS
             CX/UX
             DC/OSx
             DDE SMES
             DOS EMX
             Dynix
             EP/IX
             ESIX
             FPS
             GENIX
             Greenhills
             ISC
             MachTen 68k
             MPC
             NEWS-OS
             NextSTEP
             OpenSTEP
             Opus
             Plan 9
             RISC/os
             SCO ODT/OSR
             Stellar
             SVR2
             TI1500
             TitanOS



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             Ultrix
             Unisys Dynix

     The following platforms have their own source code
     distributions and binaries available via
     http://www.cpan.org/ports/

                                     Perl release

             OS/400 (ILE)            5.005_02
             Tandem Guardian         5.004

     The following platforms have only binaries available via
     http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html :

                                     Perl release

             Acorn RISCOS            5.005_02
             AOS                     5.002
             LynxOS                  5.004_02

     Although we do suggest that you always build your own Perl
     from the source code, both for maximal configurability and
     for security, in case you are in a hurry you can check
     http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html for binary
     distributions.


ATTRIBUTES
     See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following
     attributes:

     +---------------+------------------+
     |ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE  |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Availability   | runtime/perl-512 |
     +---------------+------------------+
     |Stability      | Uncommitted      |
     +---------------+------------------+
SEE ALSO
     perlaix, perlamiga, perlapollo, perlbeos, perlbs2000,
     perlce, perlcygwin, perldgux, perldos, perlepoc, perlebcdic,
     perlfreebsd, perlhurd, perlhpux, perlirix, perlmacos,
     perlmacosx, perlmpeix, perlnetware, perlos2, perlos390,
     perlos400, perlplan9, perlqnx, perlsolaris, perltru64,
     perlunicode, perlvmesa, perlvms, perlvos, perlwin32, and
     Win32.

AUTHORS / CONTRIBUTORS
     Abigail <abigail@foad.org>, Charles Bailey
     <bailey@newman.upenn.edu>, Graham Barr <gbarr@pobox.com>,
     Tom Christiansen <tchrist@perl.com>, Nicholas Clark



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     <nick@ccl4.org>, Thomas Dorner <Thomas.Dorner@start.de>,
     Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafayette.edu>, Dominic Dunlop
     <domo@computer.org>, Neale Ferguson
     <neale@vma.tabnsw.com.au>, David J. Fiander
     <davidf@mks.com>, Paul Green <Paul.Green@stratus.com>,
     M.J.T. Guy <mjtg@cam.ac.uk>, Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi>,
     Luther Huffman <lutherh@stratcom.com>, Nick Ing-Simmons
     <nick@ing-simmons.net>, Andreas J. Koenig
     <a.koenig@mind.de>, Markus Laker <mlaker@contax.co.uk>,
     Andrew M. Langmead <aml@world.std.com>, Larry Moore
     <ljmoore@freespace.net>, Paul Moore
     <Paul.Moore@uk.origin-it.com>, Chris Nandor
     <pudge@pobox.com>, Matthias Neeracher <neeracher@mac.com>,
     Philip Newton <pne@cpan.org>, Gary Ng
     <71564.1743@CompuServe.COM>, Tom Phoenix
     <rootbeer@teleport.com>, Andre Pirard <A.Pirard@ulg.ac.be>,
     Peter Prymmer <pvhp@forte.com>, Hugo van der Sanden
     <hv@crypt0.demon.co.uk>, Gurusamy Sarathy
     <gsar@activestate.com>, Paul J. Schinder
     <schinder@pobox.com>, Michael G Schwern <schwern@pobox.com>,
     Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org>, Nathan Torkington
     <gnat@frii.com>.  John Malmberg <wb8tyw@qsl.net>



NOTES
     This software was built from source available at
     https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland.  The original
     community source was downloaded from
     http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.12.5.tar.bz2

     Further information about this software can be found on the
     open source community website at http://www.perl.org/.






















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