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PERLAMIGA(1)                          Perl Programmers Reference Guide                          PERLAMIGA(1)



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/index.html

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-emula-
       tion, 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, some-
       times 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 read-
       ing 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 fr(.

AUTHORS
       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se

SEE ALSO
       perl(1).



perl v5.8.8                                      2006-01-07                                     PERLAMIGA(1)