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PERLUTIL(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLUTIL(1)
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.
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 " 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 explana-
tion) 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 utili-
ties 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 utili-
ties 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 doc-
umentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a
typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
CONVERTORS
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included three con-
version filters:
a2p
a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs; for example, "a2p -F:" on
the simple awk script "{print $2}" will produce a Perl program based
around this code:
while (<>) {
($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
print $Fld2;
}
s2p
Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl programs. s2p run on
"s/foo/bar" will produce a Perl program based around this:
while (<>) {
chomp;
s/foo/bar/g;
print if $printit;
}
find2perl
Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl equivalents
which use the File::Find module. As an example, "find2perl . -user
root -perm 4000 -print" produces the following callback subroutine
for "File::Find":
sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
$uid == $uid{'root'}) &&
(($mode & 0777) == 04000);
print("$name\n");
}
As well as these filters for converting other languages, the pl2pm
utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style
Perl5 modules.
Administration
libnetcfg
To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
command.
Development
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl pro-
grams, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
perlbug
perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the perl inter-
preter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the
developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug thor-
oughly before using it to submit a bug report.
h2ph
Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar
around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the cor-
responding .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 dec-
larations to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs these
days.
h2xs
h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's
also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
dprofpp
Perl comes with a profiler, the Devel::DProf module. The dprofpp
utility analyzes the output of this profiler and tells you which
subroutines are taking up the most run time. See Devel::DProf for
more information.
perlcc
perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler suite.
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, perlcc
perl v5.8.8 2006-01-07 PERLUTIL(1)
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