PERLAMIGA(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLAMIGA(1)

NAME
       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

NNOOTTEE
       PPeerrll 55..88..00 ccaannnnoott bbee bbuuiilltt iinn AAmmiiggaaOOSS..  YYoouu ccaann uussee eeiitthheerr tthhee mmaaiinnttee-
       nnaannccee rreelleeaassee PPeerrll 55..66..11 oorr tthhee ddeevveellooppmmeenntt rreelleeaassee PPeerrll 55..77..22 iinn AAmmii-
       ggaaOOSS..  SSeeee ""PPEERRLL 55..88..00 BBRROOKKEENN IINN AAMMIIGGAAOOSS"" iiff yyoouu wwaanntt ttoo hheellpp ffiixxiinngg
       tthhiiss pprroobblleemm..

SYNOPSIS
       One can read this document in the following formats:

               man perlamiga
               multiview perlamiga.guide

       to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be
       read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.

       A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets
       section of the Aminet:

             http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg/index.html

DESCRIPTION
       PPrreerreeqquuiissiitteess ffoorr CCoommppiilliinngg PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS


       UUnniixx eemmuullaattiioonn ffoorr AAmmiiggaaOOSS:: iixxeemmuull..lliibbrraarryy
             You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important
             part is iixxeemmuull..lliibbrraarryy. For a minimum setup, get the latest ver-
             sions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
             http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):

                     ixemul-bin
                     ixemul-env-bin
                     pdksh-bin

             Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add
             other packages of AADDEE (the Amiga Developers Environment).

       VVeerrssiioonn ooff AAmmiiggaa OOSS
             You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is
             version 3.1.

       SSttaarrttiinngg PPeerrll pprrooggrraammss uunnddeerr AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
       way as on any other platform, by

               perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3

       If you want to specify perl options "-myopts" to the perl itself (as
       opposed to your program), use

               perl -myopts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

       Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's EExxeeccuuttee
       command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the
       s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX
       with

               foo arg1 arg2 arg3

       (Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not neces-
       sary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it easier
       to use your script under *nix.)

       SShhoorrttccoommiinnggss ooff PPeerrll uunnddeerr AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
       deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:

       +o     fork()

       +o     some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and
             file dates

       +o     inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file

       +o     umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the
             file is finally close()d

IINNSSTTAALLLLAATTIIOONN
       Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract
       the binary distribution:

       lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha

       or

       tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz

       (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)

       For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.

AAcccceessssiinngg ddooccuummeennttaattiioonn
       MMaannppaaggeess ffoorr PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl man-
       pages, use something like this:

               man perlfunc
               man less
               man ExtUtils.MakeMaker

       to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

               man perl

       Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in
       the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl
       library will not be found.

       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
       packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
       above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.

       PPeerrll HHTTMMLL DDooccuummeennttaattiioonn oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HHTTMMLL docs.  Cd to
       directory with .pod files, and do like this

               cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
               pod2html

       After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
       directory, and go ahead with reading docs.

       Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".

       PPeerrll GGNNUU IInnffoo FFiilleess oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
       mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alter-
       nately, prebuilt info pages.

       PPeerrll LLaaTTeeXX DDooccuummeennttaattiioonn oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Can be constructed using "pod2latex".

BBUUIILLDDIINNGG PPEERRLL OONN AAMMIIGGAAOOSS
       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

       BBuuiilldd PPrreerreeqquuiissiitteess ffoorr PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       You need to have the latest iixxeemmuull (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
       Aminet.

       GGeettttiinngg tthhee PPeerrll SSoouurrccee ffoorr AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and
       extract it with:

         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz

       or get the official source from CPAN:

         http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0

       Extract it like this

         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz

       You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
       normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
       configure, but it causes no harm.)

       MMaakkiinngg PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)

         sh configure.gnu -prefix=/gg

       Now type

         make depend

       Now!

         make

       TTeessttiinngg PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Now run

         make test

       Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:

       io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t,
       lib/iopipe.t, lib/iosock.t

       IInnssttaalllliinngg tthhee bbuuiilltt PPeerrll oonn AAmmiiggaaOOSS

       Run

         make install

PPEERRLL 55..88..00 BBRROOKKEENN IINN AAMMIIGGAAOOSS
       As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
       After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
       pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
       its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
       that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).  The
       build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL
       ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not
       quite work.  Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate
       nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.  FFiixxiinngg tthhee
       bbrreeaakkaaggee rreeqquuiirreess ssoommeeoonnee qquuiittee ffaammiilliiaarr wwiitthh tthhee iixxeemmuull lliibbrraarryy,, aanndd
       hhooww oonnee iiss ssuuppppoosseedd ttoo rruunn eexxtteerrnnaall ccoommmmaannddss iinn AAmmiiggaaOOSS wwiitthhoouutt ffoorrkk(())..

AUTHORS
       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
       trg@privat.utfors.se

SEE ALSO
       perl(1).



perl v5.8.6                       2004-11-05                      PERLAMIGA(1)