PERL(1)

NAME
perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

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' ] [ -- ] [ programfile ] [ argument ]...

For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into a number of sections:

    perl                Perl overview (this section)
    perldelta           Perl changes since previous version
    perl5004delta       Perl changes in version 5.004
    perlfaq             Perl frequently asked questions
    perltoc             Perl documentation table of contents
    perldata            Perl data structures
    perlsyn             Perl syntax
    perlop              Perl operators and precedence
    perlre              Perl regular expressions
    perlrun             Perl execution and options
    perlfunc            Perl builtin functions
    perlopentut         Perl open() tutorial
    perlvar             Perl predefined variables
    perlsub             Perl subroutines
    perlmod             Perl modules: how they work
    perlmodlib          Perl modules: how to write and use
    perlmodinstall      Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
    perlform            Perl formats
    perllocale          Perl locale support
    perlref             Perl references
    perlreftut          Perl references short introduction
    perldsc             Perl data structures intro
    perllol             Perl data structures: lists of lists
    perltoot            Perl OO tutorial
    perlobj             Perl objects
    perltie             Perl objects hidden behind simple variables
    perlbot             Perl OO tricks and examples
    perlipc             Perl interprocess communication
    perlthrtut          Perl threads tutorial
    perldebug           Perl debugging
    perldiag            Perl diagnostic messages
    perlsec             Perl security
    perltrap            Perl traps for the unwary
    perlport            Perl portability guide
    perlstyle           Perl style guide
    perlpod             Perl plain old documentation
    perlbook            Perl book information
    perlembed           Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
    perlapio            Perl internal IO abstraction interface
    perlxs              Perl XS application programming interface
    perlxstut           Perl XS tutorial
    perlguts            Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
    perlcall            Perl calling conventions from C
    perlhist            Perl history records
(If you're intending to read these straight through for the first time, the suggested order will tend to reduce the number of forward references.)

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

Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is available. The default configuration for perl will place this additional documentation in the /usr/local/lib/perl5/man directory (or else in the man subdirectory of the Perl library directory). Some of this additional documentation is distributed standard with Perl, but you'll also find documentation for third-party modules there.

You should be able to view Perl's documentation with your man(1) program by including the proper directories in the appropriate start-up files, or in the MANPATH environment variable. To find out where the configuration has installed the manpages, type:

    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) configuration 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 program.

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 language 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 familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language historians will also note some vestiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds quite 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 (sometimes called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data very 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 programs through a dataflow tracing mechanism which 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 translators to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.

But wait, there's more...

Perl version 5 is nearly a complete rewrite, and provides the following additional benefits: It is now possible to write much more readable Perl code (even within regular expressions). Formerly cryptic variable names can be replaced by mnemonic identifiers. Error messages are more informative, and the optional warnings will catch many of the mistakes a novice might make. This cannot be stressed enough. Whenever you get mysterious behavior, try the -w switch!!! Whenever you don't get mysterious behavior, try using -w anyway. The new yacc grammar is one half the size of the old one. Many of the arbitrary grammar rules have been regularized. The number of reserved words has been cut by 2/3. Despite this, nearly all old Perl scripts will continue to work unchanged. Perl variables may now be declared within a lexical scope, like "auto" variables in C. Not only is this more efficient, but it contributes to better privacy for "programming in the large". Anonymous subroutines exhibit deep binding of lexical variables (closures). Any scalar value, including any array element, may now contain a reference to any other variable or subroutine. You can easily create anonymous variables and subroutines. Perl manages your reference counts for you. The Perl library is now defined in terms of modules which can be easily shared among various packages. A package may choose to import all or a portion of a module's published interface. Pragmas (that is, compiler directives) are defined and used by the same mechanism. A package can function as a class. Dynamic multiple inheritance and virtual methods are supported in a straightforward manner and with very little new syntax. Filehandles may now be treated as objects. Perl may now be embedded easily in your C or C++ application, and can either call or be called by your routines through a documented interface. The XS preprocessor is provided to make it easy to glue your C or C++ routines into Perl. Dynamic loading of modules is supported, and Perl itself can be made into a dynamic library. A major new module is the POSIX module, which provides access to all available POSIX routines and definitions, via object classes where appropriate. The new BEGIN and END blocks provide means to capture control as a package is being compiled, and after the program exits. As a degenerate case they work just like awk's BEGIN and END when you use the -p or -n switches. A Perl program may now access DBM, NDBM, SDBM, GDBM, and Berkeley DB files from the same script simultaneously. In fact, the old dbmopen interface has been generalized to allow any variable to be tied to an object class which defines its access methods. In fact, the AUTOLOAD mechanism also allows you to define any arbitrary semantics for undefined subroutine calls. It's not for just autoloading. You can now specify nongreedy quantifiers. You can now do grouping without creating a backreference. You can now write regular expressions with embedded whitespace and comments for readability. A consistent extensibility mechanism has been added that is upwardly compatible with all old regular expressions. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network described in the perlmodlib manpage contains hundreds of plug-and-play modules full of reusable code. See http://www.perl.com/CPAN for a site near you. While not yet in full production mode, a working perl-to-C compiler does exist. It can generate portable byte code, simple C, or optimized C code.

Okay, that's definitely enough hype.

AVAILABILITY
Perl is available for the vast majority of operating system platforms, including most Unix-like platforms. The following situation is as of February 1999 and Perl 5.005_03.

The following platforms are able to build Perl from the standard source code distribution available at http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/index.html

        AIX             Linux           SCO ODT/OSR
        A/UX            MachTen         Solaris
        BeOS            MPE/iX          SunOS
        BSD/OS          NetBSD          SVR4
        DG/UX           NextSTEP        Tru64 UNIX      3)
        DomainOS        OpenBSD         Ultrix
        DOS DJGPP 1)    OpenSTEP        UNICOS
        DYNIX/ptx       OS/2            VMS
        FreeBSD         OS390     2)    VOS
        HP-UX           PowerMAX        Windows 3.1     1)
        Hurd            QNX             Windows 95      1) 4)
        IRIX                            Windows 98      1) 4)
                                        Windows NT      1) 4)
        1) in DOS mode either the DOS or OS/2 ports can be used
        2) formerly known as MVS
        3) formerly known as Digital UNIX and before that DEC OSF/1
        4) compilers: Borland, Cygwin32, Mingw32 EGCS/GCC, VC++
The following platforms have been known to build Perl from the source but for the Perl release 5.005_03 we haven't been able to verify them, either because the hardware/software platforms are rather rare or because we don't have an active champion on these platforms, or both.

        3b1 FPS Plan 9
        AmigaOS GENIX PowerUX
        ConvexOS Greenhills RISC/os
        CX/UX ISC Stellar
        DC/OSx MachTen 68k SVR2
        DDE SMES MiNT TI1500
        DOS EMX MPC TitanOS
        Dynix NEWS-OS UNICOS/mk
        EP/IX Opus Unisys Dynix
        ESIX        Unixware

The following platforms are planned to be supported in the standard source code distribution of the Perl release 5.006 but are not supported in the Perl release 5.005_03:

        BS2000
        Netware
        Rhapsody
        VM/ESA
The following platforms have their own source code distributions and binaries available via http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports/index.html.

                                Perl release
        AS/400                  5.003
        MacOS                   5.004
        Netware                 5.003_07
        Tandem Guardian         5.004
The following platforms have only binaries available via http://www.perl.com/CPAN/ports/index.html.

                                Perl release
        Acorn RISCOS            5.005_02
        AOS                     5.002
        LynxOS                  5.004_02

ENVIRONMENT
See the perlrun manpage.

AUTHOR
Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>, with the help of oodles of other folks.

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

DIAGNOSTICS
The -w switch produces some lovely diagnostics.

See the perldiag manpage 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 the case of a script passed to Perl via -e switches, each -e is counted as one line.)

Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce error messages such as "Insecure dependency". See the perlsec manpage.

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 various operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-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 few arbitrary limits: a given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters. Line numbers displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short integers, so they are limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being affected by wraparound).

You may mail your bug reports (be sure to include full configuration information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source tree, or by perl -V) to <perlbug@perl.com>. If you've succeeded in compiling perl, the perlbug script in the utils/ subdirectory can be used to help mail in a bug report.

Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish 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.