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.

LIST OF UTILITIES

   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 Documentation - 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 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
	  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 produces 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(/[:
]/, $_, -1);
		  print $Fld2;
	      }

       s2p and psed
	  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;
	      }

	  When invoked as psed, it behaves as a sed implementation, written in Perl.

       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 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
");
	      }

       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.

   Administration
       config_data
	  Query or change configuration of Perl modules that use Module::Build-based configuration files for features and config data.

       libnetcfg
	  To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg command.

       perlivp
	  The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running
	  "make install" (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.

   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 standard library modules back to the
	  developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug thoroughly before using it to submit a bug report.

       perlthanks
	  This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed
	  under another name.

       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.

       enc2xs
	  enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
	  Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
	  knowledge of XS is necessary.

       xsubpp
	  xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.  It is typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

	  xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the
	  glue necessary to let Perl access those functions.

       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.

       prove
	  prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative to "make test".

       corelist
	  A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to query what modules were shipped with given versions of perl.

   General tools
       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they came along modules included in the perl distribution.

       piconv
	  piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding converter widely available for various Unixen today.	This script was primarily
	  a technology demonstrator for Perl 5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.

       ptar
	  ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.

       ptardiff
	  ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility requires
	  the "Text::Diff" module to function properly; this module isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)

       shasum
	  This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module, is used to print or verify SHA checksums.

   Installation
       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the perl distribution.

       cpan
	  cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.	It allows you to install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information about
	  them, and a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,

	      perl -MCPAN -e shell

       cpanp
	  cpanp is, like cpan, a command-line interface to the CPAN, using the "CPANPLUS" module as a back-end. It can be used interactively or
	  imperatively.

       cpan2dist
	  cpan2dist is a tool to create distributions (or packages) from CPAN modules, then suitable for your package manager of choice. Support
	  for specific formats are available from CPAN as "CPANPLUS::Dist::*" modules.

       instmodsh
	  A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an
	  installed module.

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, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, cpanp, cpan2dist, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar,
       ptardiff, shasum

perl v5.12.1							    2010-05-07							       PERLUTIL(1)