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PROGRAM:

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

WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul!

This is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. Still to be
implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. Many perl commands are
missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. These gaps will,
with perseverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near
future.To install this software:

1. Create the source directories and libraries for perl by running the plan9/setup.rc
command (i.e., located in the plan9 subdirectory). Note: the setup routine assumes that
you haven't dearchived these files into /sys/src/cmd/perl. After running setup.rc you may
delete the copy of the source you originally detarred, as source code has now been
installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. If you plan on installing perl binaries for all
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.)

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