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.
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:
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
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.
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.
General tools
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.
zipdetails
zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure of the zip file. It is not concerned
with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip file.
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
perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker, splain, perldiag,
"roffitall|roffitall", a2p, s2p, find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp,
cpan, cpanp, cpan2dist, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum, zipdetails
perl v5.16.3 2013-03-04 PERLUTIL(1)
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