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 modules documentation, if appropriate.
LIST OF UTILITIES
Documentation
perldoc |
The main interface to Perls documentation is perldoc, although if youre reading this, its more than likely that youve 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 its 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 isnt 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 youre 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 itll explain it for you. |
roffitall |
The roffitallutility 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. |
Convertors
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, weve 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]/, $_, 9999);
print $Fld2;
}
|
s2p and psed |
Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl programs. s2p run
on s/foo/barwill produce a Perl program based around this:
while (<>) {
chomp;
s/foo/bar/g;
print if $printit;
}
When invoked as psed, it behaves as a sed implementation, written in Perl. |
find2perl |
Finally, find2perl translates findcommands to Perl equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an example, find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -printproduces the following callback subroutine for File::Find:
sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
$uid == $uid{root}) &&
(($mode & 0777) == 04000);
print("$name\n");
}
|
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 platforms 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. |
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.phor 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 - theyll 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. Its 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
of Test::Harness. Its 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::Diffmodule to function properly; this module isnt distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.) |
shasum |
This utility, that comes with the Digest::SHAmodule, is used to print or verify SHA checksums. |
Installation
These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that dont 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 CPANPLUSmodule 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