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perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
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.
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.
perldoc
will usually call pod2man
to
translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see the perlpod manpage for an
explanation) into a man page, 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
will
produce HTML pages from POD, and pod2latex
, which produces LaTeX
files.
pod2usage
will just extract the "USAGE" section; some of
the utilities will automatically call pod2usage
on themselves when
you call them with -help
.
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
utility will look for errors in your markup.
splain
is an interface to the perldiag manpage - paste in your error message
to it, and it'll explain it for you.
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.
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included three conversion filters:
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
converts sed
scripts to Perl programs. s2p
run
on s/foo/bar
will produce a Perl program based around this:
while (<>) { chomp; s/foo/bar/g; print if $printit; }
find2perl
translates find
commands to Perl equivalents which
use the File::Find module. As an example,
find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print
produces the following callback
subroutine for File::Find
:
sub wanted { my ($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.
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
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.
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 ones.
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 - they'll convert C structures and union declarations
to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs
these days.
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. It's also
very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
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 the Devel::Dprof manpage
for more information.
perlcc
is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler suite.
perldoc, pod2man, the perlpod manpage, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker, splain, the perldiag manpage, roffitall, a2p, s2p, find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs, dprofpp, the Devel::Dprof manpage, perlcc