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.
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 Docu-mentation Documentation
mentation - 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 writ-ten written
ten in POD. For instance, while utilities have "USAGE" sections, Perl modules usually have "SYNOP-SIS" "SYNOPSIS"
SIS" 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 pro-duces produces
duces a typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
CONVERTORS
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
$2}" will produce a Perl program based around this code:
while (<>) {
($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
print $Fld2;
}
s2p
Similarly, 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 $printit;
}
find2perl
Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl equivalents which use the File::Find module.
As an example, "find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print" produces the following callback subrou-tine subroutine
tine for "File::Find":
sub wanted {
my ($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 oldstyle
style Perl 4 libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.
Administration
libnetcfg
To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg command.
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 stan-dard standard
dard 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.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
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
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.
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.
perlcc
perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler suite.
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, perlcc
perl v5.8.8 2006-01-07 PERLUTIL(1)
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