PERLPLAN9(1)	       Perl Programmers Reference Guide 	  PERLPLAN9(1)



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 cant find answers in these man pages, contact
       Luther Huffman at lutherh@stratcom.com and well 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-con
       figuring and are able to correctly create their own shebang path from
       config information located in Plan 9 Perl. These you wont need to be
       worried about.

       Whats 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, File
       Handle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect to see others (and DynaLoading!) in
       the future.

       Whats not in Plan 9 Perl

       As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isnt 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" arent provided because the concept
       does not exist within Plan 9. Others, such as some of the socket-
       related functions, simply havent 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 shouldnt 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 9s ANSI
       POSIX Environment (APE). Signal stacking isnt 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 havent 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 boot
       straps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB RAM machine takes roughly 30 min
       utes 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.)

BUGS
       "As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world .
       . ." - Carl Sagan

Revision date
       This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.

AUTHOR
       Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct
       comments toward:

       Luther Huffman, lutherh@stratcom.com, Strategic Computer Solutions,
       Inc.



perl v5.8.8			  2008-04-25			  PERLPLAN9(1)