## SYNOPSIS

           perl [ -sTuU ] [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ]
               [ -cw ] [ -d[:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ]
               [ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal] ]
               [ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ]
               [ -P ] [ -S ] [ -x[dir] ]
               [ -i[extension] ] [ -e 'command' ] [ -- ] [ program
           file ] [ argument ]...

           If you're new to Perl, you should start with perlintro,
           which is a general intro for beginners and provides some
           background to help you navigate the rest of Perl's exten
           sive documentation.

           For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into
           several sections.

           Overview

               perl                Perl overview (this section)
               perlintro           Perl introduction for beginners
               perltoc             Perl documentation table of contents

           Tutorials

               perlreftut          Perl references short introduction
               perldsc             Perl data structures intro
               perllol             Perl data structures: arrays of arrays

               perlrequick         Perl regular expressions quick start
               perlretut           Perl regular expressions tutorial

               perlboot            Perl OO tutorial for beginners
               perltoot            Perl OO tutorial, part 1
               perltooc            Perl OO tutorial, part 2
               perlbot             Perl OO tricks and examples

               perlstyle           Perl style guide

               perltrap            Perl traps for the unwary
               perldebtut          Perl debugging tutorial

               perlfaq             Perl frequently asked questions
                 perlfaq1          General Questions About Perl
                 perlfaq2          Obtaining and Learning about Perl
                 perlfaq3          Programming Tools
                 perlfaq4          Data Manipulation
                 perlfaq5          Files and Formats
                 perlfaq6          Regexes
                 perlfaq7          Perl Language Issues
                 perlfaq8          System Interaction
                 perlfaq9          Networking

               perlpod             Perl plain old documentation
               perlpodspec         Perl plain old documentation format specification
               perlrun             Perl execution and options
               perldiag            Perl diagnostic messages
               perllexwarn         Perl warnings and their control
               perldebug           Perl debugging
               perlvar             Perl predefined variables
               perlre              Perl regular expressions, the rest of the story
               perlref             Perl references, the rest of the story
               perlform            Perl formats
               perlobj             Perl objects
               perltie             Perl objects hidden behind simple variables
                 perldbmfilter     Perl DBM filters

               perlipc             Perl interprocess communication
               perlfork            Perl fork() information
               perlnumber          Perl number semantics

               perlthrtut          Perl threads tutorial
                 perlothrtut         Old Perl threads tutorial

               perlport            Perl portability guide
               perllocale          Perl locale support
               perluniintro        Perl Unicode introduction
               perlunicode         Perl Unicode support
               perlebcdic          Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms

               perlsec             Perl security

               perlmod             Perl modules: how they work
               perlmodlib          Perl modules: how to write and use
               perlmodstyle        Perl modules: how to write modules with style
               perlmodinstall      Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
               perlnewmod          Perl modules: preparing a new module for distribution

               perlutil            utilities packaged with the Perl distribution

               perlcompile         Perl compiler suite intro

               perlfilter          Perl source filters

           Internals and C Language Interface

               perlembed           Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
               perldebguts         Perl debugging guts and tips
               perlxstut           Perl XS tutorial
               perlxs              Perl XS application programming interface
               perlclib            Internal replacements for standard C library functions
               perlguts            Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
               perlcall            Perl calling conventions from C

               perlapi             Perl API listing (autogenerated)
               perldelta           Perl changes since previous version
               perl572delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.2
               perl571delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.1
               perl570delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.0
               perl561delta        Perl changes in version 5.6.1
               perl56delta         Perl changes in version 5.6
               perl5005delta       Perl changes in version 5.005
               perl5004delta       Perl changes in version 5.004

           Language-Specific

               perlcn              Perl for Simplified Chinese (in EUC-CN)
               perljp              Perl for Japanese (in EUC-JP)
               perlko              Perl for Korean (in EUC-KR)
               perltw              Perl for Traditional Chinese (in Big5)

           Platform-Specific

               perlaix             Perl notes for AIX
               perlamiga           Perl notes for AmigaOS
               perlapollo          Perl notes for Apollo DomainOS
               perlbeos            Perl notes for BeOS
               perlbs2000          Perl notes for POSIX-BC BS2000
               perlce              Perl notes for WinCE
               perlcygwin          Perl notes for Cygwin
               perldgux            Perl notes for DG/UX
               perldos             Perl notes for DOS
               perlepoc            Perl notes for EPOC
               perlfreebsd         Perl notes for FreeBSD
               perlhpux            Perl notes for HP-UX
               perlhurd            Perl notes for Hurd
               perlirix            Perl notes for Irix
               perlmachten         Perl notes for Power MachTen
               perlmacos           Perl notes for Mac OS (Classic)
               perlmint            Perl notes for MiNT
               perlmpeix           Perl notes for MPE/iX
               perlnetware         Perl notes for NetWare
               perlos2             Perl notes for OS/2
               perlos390           Perl notes for OS/390
               perlplan9           Perl notes for Plan 9
               perlqnx             Perl notes for QNX
               perlsolaris         Perl notes for Solaris
               perltru64           Perl notes for Tru64
               perluts             Perl notes for UTS
               perlvmesa           Perl notes for VM/ESA
               perlvms             Perl notes for VMS
               perlvos             Perl notes for Stratus VOS
               perlwin32           Perl notes for Windows

           By default, the manpages listed above are installed in the
           /usr/local/man/ directory.

               perl -V:man.dir

           If the directories have a common stem, such as
           /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man3, you need only
           to add that stem (/usr/local/man) to your man(1) configu
           ration files or your MANPATH environment variable.  If
           they do not share a stem, you'll have to add both stems.

           If that doesn't work for some reason, you can still use
           the supplied perldoc script to view module information.
           You might also look into getting a replacement man pro
           gram.

           If something strange has gone wrong with your program and
           you're not sure where you should look for help, try the -w
           switch first.  It will often point out exactly where the
           trouble is.

## DESCRIPTION

           Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
           files, extracting information from those text files, and
           printing reports based on that information.  It's also a
           good language for many system management tasks.  The lan
           guage is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient,
           complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

           Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of
           the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people famil
           iar with those languages should have little difficulty
           with it.  (Language historians will also note some ves
           tiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)  Expression
           syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax.  Unlike
           most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the
           size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can
           slurp in your whole file as a single string.  Recursion is
           of unlimited depth.  And the tables used by hashes (some
           times called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to
           prevent degraded performance.  Perl can use sophisticated
           pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data
           quickly.  Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can
           also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look
           like hashes.  Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C pro
           grams through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents
           many stupid security holes.

           If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk
           or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a
           little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing
           in C, then Perl may be for you.  There are also transla
           tors to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.

           ·   roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple
               simultaneous DBM implementations)

               Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.

           ·   subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and
               prototyped

               Described in perlsub.

           ·   arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous func
               tions

               Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perl
               lol.

           ·   object-oriented programming

               Described in perlobj, perlboot, perltoot, perltooc,
               and perlbot.

           ·   compilability into C code or Perl bytecode

               Described in B and B::Bytecode.

           ·   support for light-weight processes (threads)

               Described in perlthrtut and Thread.

           ·   support for internationalization, localization, and
               Unicode

               Described in perllocale and utf8.

           ·   lexical scoping

               Described in perlsub.

           ·   regular expression enhancements

               Described in perlre, with additional examples in per
               lop.

           ·   enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment,
               with integrated editor support

               Described in perldebtut, perldebug and perldebguts.

           ·   POSIX 1003.1 compliant library

               Described in POSIX.

           If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of
           help to others who wish to advocate the use of Perl in
           their applications, or if you wish to simply express your
           gratitude to Larry and the Perl developers, please write
           to perl-thanks@perl.org .

## FILES

            "@INC"                 locations of perl libraries

## SEE ALSO

            a2p    awk to perl translator
            s2p    sed to perl translator

            http://www.perl.com/       the Perl Home Page
            http://www.cpan.org/       the Comprehensive Perl Archive
            http://www.perl.org/       Perl Mongers (Perl user groups)

## DIAGNOSTICS

           The "use warnings" pragma (and the -w switch) produces
           some lovely diagnostics.

           See perldiag for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics.
           The "use diagnostics" pragma automatically turns Perl's
           normally terse warnings and errors into these longer
           forms.

           Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the
           error, with an indication of the next token or token type
           that was to be examined.  (In a script passed to Perl via
           -e switches, each -e is counted as one line.)

           Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can pro
           duce error messages such as "Insecure dependency".  See
           perlsec.

           Did we mention that you should definitely consider using
           the -w switch?

## BUGS

           The -w switch is not mandatory.

           Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of var
           ious operations such as type casting, atof(), and float
           ing-point output with sprintf().

           If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and
           writes on a particular stream, so does Perl.  (This
           doesn't apply to sysread() and syswrite().)

           While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary
           size limits (apart from memory size), there are still a
           Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that.

## NOTES

           The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it."
           Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the
           reader.

           The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
           Impatience, and Hubris.  See the Camel Book for why.

    perl v5.8.0                 2002-06-08                    PERL(1)