PERLPLAN9(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLPLAN9(1)
NAME
perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl
DESCRIPTION
These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9 Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a
replacement for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both copious and excellent). If you have any
questions to which you can't find answers in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at [email protected]
and we'll try to answer them.
Invoking Perl
Perl is invoked from the command line as described in perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first line
such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a shebang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS shell
where to find the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this statement should be "#!/bin/perl" if you wish to be
able to directly invoke the script by its name.
Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce Acme-
friendly error messages of the form "filename:18".
Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are self-configuring and are able to correctly create
their own shebang path from config information located in Plan 9 Perl. These you won't need to be worried
about.
What's in Plan 9 Perl
Although Plan 9 Perl currently only provides static loading, it is built with a number of useful extensions.
These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect to see others (and DynaLoading!) in the future.
What's not in Plan 9 Perl
As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-priority
items.
Perl5 Functions not currently supported in Plan 9 Perl
Some, such as "chown" and "umask" aren't provided because the concept does not exist within Plan 9. Others,
such as some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written yet. Many in the latter category may
be supported in the future.
The functions not currently implemented include:
chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask
There may be several other functions that have undefined behavior so this list shouldn't be considered
complete.
Signals in Plan 9 Perl
For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal
emulation provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal stacking isn't supported. The signals
provided are:
SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU
COMPILING AND INSTALLING PERL ON PLAN 9
architectures, run "setup.rc -a".
2. After making sure that you have adequate privileges to build system software, from
/sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:
mk install
If you wish to install perl versions for all architectures (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run:
mk installall
3. Wait. The build process will take a *long* time because perl bootstraps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM
machine takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from scratch.
Installing Perl Documentation on Plan 9
This perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of documentation. To add these to the built-in manuals
that come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:
mk man
To begin your reading, start with:
man perl
This is a good introduction and will direct you towards other man pages that may interest you.
(Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear not.)
BUGS
"As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world . . ." - Carl Sagan
Revision date
This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.
AUTHOR
Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct comments toward:
Luther Huffman, [email protected], Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc.
perl v5.16.3 2013-02-26 PERLPLAN9(1)
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