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 utili-
ties 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 explana-
tion) 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 utili-
ties 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(/[:
]/, $_, 9999);
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
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 develop-
ers; 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 corre-
sponding .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 sub-
routines 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 of Test::Harness. It's an alternative to "make test".
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.
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
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, instmodsh, piconv, prove
perl v5.8.9 2007-11-17 PERLUTIL(1)