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PROGRAM:

NAME

perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

NOTE

Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the maintenance release Perl
5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in AmigaOS. See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN
AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing this problem.

SYNOPSIS

One can read this document in the following formats:

man perlamiga
multiview perlamiga.guide

to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be read as is: either as
README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.

A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets section of the
Aminet:

http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg

DESCRIPTION

Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS
Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is
ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions of the following
packages from the Aminet archives ( <http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/> ):

ixemul-bin
ixemul-env-bin
pdksh-bin

Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages of ADE
(the Amiga Developers Environment).

Version of Amiga OS
You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is version 3.1.

Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same way as on any other
platform, by

perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3

If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as opposed to your
program), use

perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute command that honors
the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can
invoke your scripts like under UNIX with

foo arg1 arg2 arg3

(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not necessary, perl would be
enough, but having full path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.)

Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS
Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of deficiencies in the
UNIX-emulation, most notably:

· fork()

· some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates

· inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file

· umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is finally
close()d

INSTALLATION

Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract the binary
distribution:

lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha

or

tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz

(Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)

For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.

Accessing documentation

Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS
If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl manpages, use something
like this:

man perlfunc
man less
man ExtUtils.MakeMaker

to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

man perl

Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in the
/ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl library will not be
found.

Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for packages, and as
usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3 above - to avoid shadowing by the
less(1) manpage.

Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS
If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs. Cd to directory with
.pod files, and do like this

cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
pod2html

After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this directory, and go ahead
with reading docs.

Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".

Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS
Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl" mode loaded. You
need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alternately, prebuilt info pages.

Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS
Can be constructed using "pod2latex".

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS

Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS
You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet.

Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS
You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and extract it with:

tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz

or get the official source from CPAN:

http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0

Extract it like this

tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz

You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is normal and
expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file configure, but it causes no
harm.)

Making Perl on AmigaOS
Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)

sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg

Now type

make depend

Now!

make

Testing Perl on AmigaOS
Now run

make test

Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:

io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t, lib/io_pipe.t,
lib/io_sock.t

Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS
Run

make install

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS

As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2. After Perl 5.7.2
(change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the
individual changes) Perl dropped its internal support for vfork(), and that was very
probably the step that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork). The build
finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL ends up as "0" in the
produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not quite work. Also, executing miniperl in
backticks seems to generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.
Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and how one
is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().

AUTHORS

Norbert Pueschel, [email protected] Jan-Erik Karlsson, [email protected]

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