NAME¶
perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
DESCRIPTION¶
Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs a range
of utilities on your system. There are also several utilities which are used
by the Perl distribution itself as part of the install process. This document
exists to list all of these utilities, explain what they are for and provide
pointers to each module's documentation, if appropriate.
LIST OF UTILITIES¶
Documentation¶
- perldoc
- The main interface to Perl's documentation is
"perldoc", although if you're reading this, it's more than
likely that you've already found it. perldoc will extract and
format the documentation from any file in the current directory, any Perl
module installed on the system, or any of the standard documentation
pages, such as this one. Use "perldoc <name>" to get
information on any of the utilities described in this document.
- pod2man and pod2text
- If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually
call pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see
perlpod for an explanation) into a manpage, and then run man to
display it; if man isn't available, pod2text will be used
instead and the output piped through your favourite pager.
- pod2html and pod2latex
- As well as these two, there are two other converters:
pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD, and pod2latex,
which produces LaTeX files.
- pod2usage
- If you just want to know how to use the utilities described
here, pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE" section;
some of the utilities will automatically call pod2usage on
themselves when you call them with "-help".
- podselect
- pod2usage is a special case of podselect, a
utility to extract named sections from documents written in POD. For
instance, while utilities have "USAGE" sections, Perl modules
usually have "SYNOPSIS" sections: "podselect -s
"SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this section for a given
file.
- podchecker
- If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the
podchecker utility will look for errors in your markup.
- splain
- splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your
error message to it, and it'll explain it for you.
- roffitall
- The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your
system but lives in the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it
converts all the documentation from the distribution to *roff
format, and produces a typeset PostScript or text file of the whole
lot.
Converters¶
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included three conversion
filters:
- a2p
- a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs;
for example, "a2p -F:" on the simple awk script
"{print $2}" will produce a Perl program based around this code:
while (<>) {
($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, -1);
print $Fld2;
}
- s2p and psed
- Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl
programs. s2p run on "s/foo/bar" will produce a Perl
program based around this:
while (<>) {
chomp;
s/foo/bar/g;
print if $printit;
}
When invoked as psed, it behaves as a sed implementation,
written in Perl.
- find2perl
- Finally, find2perl translates "find"
commands to Perl equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an
example, "find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print" produces the
following callback subroutine for "File::Find":
sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
$uid == $uid{'root'}) &&
(($mode & 0777) == 04000);
print("$name\n");
}
As well as these filters for converting other languages, the pl2pm utility will
help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.
Administration¶
- config_data
- Query or change configuration of Perl modules that use
Module::Build-based configuration files for features and config data.
- libnetcfg
- To display and change the libnet configuration run the
libnetcfg command.
- perlivp
- The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code
build time to test the Perl version it was built under. It can be used
after running "make install" (or your platform's equivalent
procedure) to verify that perl and its libraries have been installed
correctly.
Development¶
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl programs, and in
particular, extending Perl with C.
- perlbug
- perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the
perl interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the
developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug
thoroughly before using it to submit a bug report.
- perlthanks
- This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you
message back to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just
perlbug installed under another name.
- h2ph
- Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C
libraries, programmers used to get library constants by reading through
the C header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or
similar around - the .ph file should be created by running
h2ph on the corresponding .h file. See the h2ph
documentation for more on how to convert a whole bunch of header files at
once.
- c2ph and pstruct
- c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same
program but behave differently depending on how they are called, provide
another way of getting at C with Perl - they'll convert C structures and
union declarations to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of
h2xs these days.
- h2xs
- h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and
will try and write as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it
can. It's also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl
modules.
- enc2xs
- enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode
from either Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files
(.enc). Besides being used internally during the build process of the
Encode module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.
No knowledge of XS is necessary.
- xsubpp
- xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C
code. It is typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the glue
necessary to let Perl access those functions.
- dprofpp
- Perl comes with a profiler, the Devel::DProf module.
The dprofpp utility analyzes the output of this profiler and tells
you which subroutines are taking up the most run time. See Devel::DProf
for more information.
- prove
- prove is a command-line interface to the
test-running functionality of Test::Harness. It's an alternative to
"make test".
- corelist
- A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList",
to query what modules were shipped with given versions of perl.
A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they came
along modules included in the perl distribution.
- piconv
- piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a
character encoding converter widely available for various Unixen today.
This script was primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl 5.8.0, but
you can use piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.
- ptar
- ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure
Perl.
- ptardiff
- ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff
between an extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this
utility requires the "Text::Diff" module to function properly;
this module isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the
CPAN.)
- ptargrep
- ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to
the contents of files in a tar archive.
- shasum
- This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA"
module, is used to print or verify SHA checksums.
Installation¶
These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the perl
distribution.
- cpan
- cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm. It
allows you to install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get
information about them, and a lot more. It is similar to the command line
mode of the CPAN module,
perl -MCPAN -e shell
- cpanp
- cpanp is, like cpan, a command-line interface
to the CPAN, using the "CPANPLUS" module as a back-end. It can
be used interactively or imperatively.
- cpan2dist
- cpan2dist is a tool to create distributions (or
packages) from CPAN modules, then suitable for your package manager of
choice. Support for specific formats are available from CPAN as
"CPANPLUS::Dist::*" modules.
- instmodsh
- A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine
installed modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from
an installed module.
SEE ALSO¶
perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker, splain,
perldiag, roffitall, a2p, s2p, find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph,
c2ph, h2xs, dprofpp, Devel::DProf, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, cpanp, cpan2dist,
instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum