perlfaq2
PERLFAQ2(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLFAQ2(1)
NAME
perlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl ($Revision: 1.29 $, $Date:
2004/10/25 18:37:23 $)
DESCRIPTION
This section of the FAQ answers questions about where to find source
and documentation for Perl, support, and related matters.
What machines support Perl? Where do I get it?
The standard release of Perl (the one maintained by the perl develop-
ment team) is distributed only in source code form. You can find this
at http://www.cpan.org/src/latest.tar.gz , which is in a standard
Internet format (a gzipped archive in POSIX tar format).
Perl builds and runs on a bewildering number of platforms. Virtually
all known and current Unix derivatives are supported (Perl's native
platform), as are other systems like VMS, DOS, OS/2, Windows, QNX,
BeOS, OS X, MPE/iX and the Amiga.
Binary distributions for some proprietary platforms, including Apple
systems, can be found http://www.cpan.org/ports/ directory. Because
these are not part of the standard distribution, they may and in fact
do differ from the base Perl port in a variety of ways. You'll have to
check their respective release notes to see just what the differences
are. These differences can be either positive (e.g. extensions for the
features of the particular platform that are not supported in the
source release of perl) or negative (e.g. might be based upon a less
current source release of perl).
How can I get a binary version of Perl?
If you don't have a C compiler because your vendor for whatever reasons
did not include one with your system, the best thing to do is grab a
binary version of gcc from the net and use that to compile perl with.
CPAN only has binaries for systems that are terribly hard to get free
compilers for, not for Unix systems.
Some URLs that might help you are:
http://www.cpan.org/ports/
http://www.perl.com/pub/language/info/software.html
Someone looking for a Perl for Win16 might look to Laszlo Molnar's
djgpp port in http://www.cpan.org/ports/#msdos , which comes with clear
installation instructions. A simple installation guide for MS-DOS
using Ilya Zakharevich's OS/2 port is available at
http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perl5dos.html and similarly for Windows
3.1 at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perlwin3.html .
I don't have a C compiler on my system. How can I compile perl?
Since you don't have a C compiler, you're doomed and your vendor should
be sacrificed to the Sun gods. But that doesn't help you.
What you need to do is get a binary version of gcc for your system
first. Consult the Usenet FAQs for your operating system for informa-
tion on where to get such a binary version.
I copied the Perl binary from one machine to another, but scripts don't
work.
That's probably because you forgot libraries, or library paths differ.
You really should build the whole distribution on the machine it will
eventually live on, and then type "make install". Most other
approaches are doomed to failure.
One simple way to check that things are in the right place is to print
out the hard-coded @INC that perl looks through for libraries:
% perl -le 'print for @INC'
If this command lists any paths that don't exist on your system, then
you may need to move the appropriate libraries to these locations, or
create symbolic links, aliases, or shortcuts appropriately. @INC is
also printed as part of the output of
% perl -V
You might also want to check out "How do I keep my own module/library
directory?" in perlfaq8.
I grabbed the sources and tried to compile but gdbm/dynamic load-
ing/malloc/linking/... failed. How do I make it work?
Read the INSTALL file, which is part of the source distribution. It
describes in detail how to cope with most idiosyncrasies that the Con-
figure script can't work around for any given system or architecture.
What modules and extensions are available for Perl? What is CPAN?
What does CPAN/src/... mean?
CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a ~1.2Gb archive
replicated on nearly 200 machines all over the world. CPAN contains
source code, non-native ports, documentation, scripts, and many third-
party modules and extensions, designed for everything from commercial
database interfaces to keyboard/screen control to web walking and CGI
scripts. The master web site for CPAN is http://www.cpan.org/ and
there is the CPAN Multiplexer at http://www.cpan.org/CPAN.html which
will choose a mirror near you via DNS. See http://www.perl.com/CPAN
(without a slash at the end) for how this process works. Also,
http://mirror.cpan.org/ has a nice interface to the
http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORED.BY mirror directory.
See the CPAN FAQ at http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html for answers
to the most frequently asked questions about CPAN including how to
become a mirror.
CPAN/path/... is a naming convention for files available on CPAN sites.
CPAN indicates the base directory of a CPAN mirror, and the rest of the
path is the path from that directory to the file. For instance, if
you're using ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN as your CPAN
site, the file CPAN/misc/japh is downloadable as
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/misc/japh .
Considering that there are close to two thousand existing modules in
the archive, one probably exists to do nearly anything you can think
of. Current categories under CPAN/modules/by-category/ include Perl
core modules; development support; operating system interfaces; net-
working, devices, and interprocess communication; data type utilities;
database interfaces; user interfaces; interfaces to other languages;
filenames, file systems, and file locking; internationalization and
locale; world wide web support; server and daemon utilities; archiving
and compression; image manipulation; mail and news; control flow utili-
ties; filehandle and I/O; Microsoft Windows modules; and miscellaneous
modules.
See http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html or
http://search.cpan.org/ for a more complete list of modules by cate-
gory.
CPAN is not affiliated with O'Reilly Media.
Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?
Certainly not. Larry expects that he'll be certified before Perl is.
Where can I get information on Perl?
The complete Perl documentation is available with the Perl distribu-
tion. If you have Perl installed locally, you probably have the docu-
mentation installed as well: type "man perl" if you're on a system
resembling Unix. This will lead you to other important man pages,
including how to set your $MANPATH. If you're not on a Unix system,
access to the documentation will be different; for example, documenta-
tion might only be in HTML format. All proper Perl installations have
fully-accessible documentation.
You might also try "perldoc perl" in case your system doesn't have a
proper man command, or it's been misinstalled. If that doesn't work,
try looking in /usr/local/lib/perl5/pod for documentation.
If all else fails, consult http://perldoc.cpan.org/ or http://www.perl-
doc.com/ both offer the complete documentation in html format.
Many good books have been written about Perl--see the section below for
more details.
Tutorial documents are included in current or upcoming Perl releases
include perltoot for objects or perlboot for a beginner's approach to
objects, perlopentut for file opening semantics, perlreftut for manag-
ing references, perlretut for regular expressions, perlthrtut for
threads, perldebtut for debugging, and perlxstut for linking C and Perl
together. There may be more by the time you read this. The following
URLs might also be of assistance:
http://perldoc.cpan.org/
http://www.perldoc.com/
http://bookmarks.cpan.org/search.cgi?cat=Training%2FTutorials
What are the Perl newsgroups on Usenet? Where do I post questions?
Several groups devoted to the Perl language are on Usenet:
comp.lang.perl.announce Moderated announcement group
comp.lang.perl.misc High traffic general Perl discussion
comp.lang.perl.moderated Moderated discussion group
comp.lang.perl.modules Use and development of Perl modules
comp.lang.perl.tk Using Tk (and X) from Perl
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Writing CGI scripts for the Web.
Some years ago, comp.lang.perl was divided into those groups, and
comp.lang.perl itself officially removed. While that group may still
be found on some news servers, it is unwise to use it, because postings
there will not appear on news servers which honour the official list of
group names. Use comp.lang.perl.misc for topics which do not have a
more-appropriate specific group.
There is also a Usenet gateway to Perl mailing lists sponsored by
perl.org at nntp://nntp.perl.org , a web interface to the same lists at
http://nntp.perl.org/group/ and these lists are also available under
the "perl.*" hierarchy at http://groups.google.com . Other groups are
listed at http://lists.perl.org/ ( also known as http://lists.cpan.org/
).
A nice place to ask questions is the PerlMonks site, http://www.perl-
monks.org/ , or the Perl Beginners mailing list
http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=beginners .
Note that none of the above are supposed to write your code for you:
asking questions about particular problems or general advice is fine,
but asking someone to write your code for free is not very cool.
Where should I post source code?
You should post source code to whichever group is most appropriate, but
feel free to cross-post to comp.lang.perl.misc. If you want to cross-
post to alt.sources, please make sure it follows their posting stan-
dards, including setting the Followup-To header line to NOT include
alt.sources; see their FAQ (
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-sources-intro/ ) for details.
If you're just looking for software, first use Google (
http://www.google.com ), Google's usenet search interface (
http://groups.google.com ), and CPAN Search ( http://search.cpan.org
). This is faster and more productive than just posting a request.
Perl Books
A number of books on Perl and/or CGI programming are available. A few
of these are good, some are OK, but many aren't worth your money.
There is a list of these books, some with extensive reviews, at
http://books.perl.org/ .
The incontestably definitive reference book on Perl, written by the
creator of Perl, is now (Sept 2004) in its third edition:
Programming Perl (the "Camel Book"):
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
(English, translations to several languages are also available)
The companion volume to the Camel containing thousands of real-world
examples, mini-tutorials, and complete programs is:
The Perl Cookbook (the "Ram Book"):
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington,
with Foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 0-596-00313-7 [2nd Edition August 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlckbk2/
If you're already a seasoned programmer, then the Camel Book might suf-
fice for you to learn Perl from. If you're not, check out the Llama
book:
Learning Perl (the "Llama Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix
ISBN 0-596-00132-0 [3rd edition July 2001]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/
And for more advanced information on writing larger programs, presented
in the same style as the Llama book, continue your education with the
Alpaca book:
Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules (the "Alpaca Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
If you're not an accidental programmer, but a more serious and possibly
even degreed computer scientist who doesn't need as much hand-holding
as we try to provide in the Llama, please check out the delightful book
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1997, 3rd printing Spring 1998]
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/97563-X.htm
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/chapman/perl/perltpc.html (errata etc)
If you are more at home in Windows the following is available (though
unfortunately rather dated).
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems (the "Gecko Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
Addison-Wesley ( http://www.awlonline.com/ ) and Manning (
http://www.manning.com/ ) are also publishers of some fine Perl books
such as Object Oriented Programming with Perl by Damian Conway and Net-
work Programming with Perl by Lincoln Stein.
An excellent technical book discounter is Bookpool at
http://www.bookpool.com/ where a 30% discount or more is not unusual.
What follows is a list of the books that the FAQ authors found person-
ally useful. Your mileage may (but, we hope, probably won't) vary.
Recommended books on (or mostly on) Perl follow.
References
Programming Perl
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
Perl 5 Pocket Reference
by Johan Vromans
ISBN 0-596-00032-4 [3rd edition May 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr3/
Perl in a Nutshell
by Ellen Siever, Stephan Spainhour, and Nathan Patwardhan
ISBN 1-56592-286-7 [1st edition December 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlnut/
Tutorials
Elements of Programming with Perl
by Andrew L. Johnson
ISBN 1-884777-80-5 [1st edition October 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Johnson/
Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz and Tom Phoenix
ISBN 0-596-00132-0 [3rd edition July 2001]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperl3/
Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
Learning Perl on Win32 Systems
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1997, 3rd printing Spring 1998]
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/97563-X.htm
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/chapman/perl/perltpc.html (errata etc)
Cross-Platform Perl
by Eric Foster-Johnson
ISBN 1-55851-483-X [2nd edition September 2000]
http://www.pconline.com/~erc/perlbook.htm
MacPerl: Power and Ease
by Vicki Brown and Chris Nandor,
with foreword by Matthias Neeracher
ISBN 1-881957-32-2 [1st edition May 1998]
http://www.macperl.com/ptf_book/
Task-Oriented
The Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-243-3 [1st edition August 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/
Effective Perl Programming
by Joseph Hall
ISBN 0-201-41975-0 [1st edition 1998]
http://www.awl.com/
Special Topics
Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
ISBN 0-596-00289-0 [2nd edition July 2002]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/
Network Programming with Perl
by Lincoln Stein
ISBN 0-201-61571-1 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.awlonline.com/
Object Oriented Perl
Damian Conway
with foreword by Randal L. Schwartz
ISBN 1-884777-79-1 [1st edition August 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Conway/
Data Munging with Perl
Dave Cross
ISBN 1-930110-00-6 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.manning.com/cross
Mastering Perl/Tk
by Steve Lidie and Nancy Walsh
ISBN 1-56592-716-8 [1st edition January 2002]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mastperltk/
Extending and Embedding Perl
by Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens
ISBN 1-930110-82-0 [1st edition August 2002]
http://www.manning.com/jenness
Perl Debugger Pocket Reference
by Richard Foley
ISBN 0-596-00503-2 [1st edition January 2004]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldebugpr/
Perl in Magazines
The first (and for a long time, only) periodical devoted to All Things
Perl, The Perl Journal contains tutorials, demonstrations, case stud-
ies, announcements, contests, and much more. TPJ has columns on web
development, databases, Win32 Perl, graphical programming, regular
expressions, and networking, and sponsors the Obfuscated Perl Contest
and the Perl Poetry Contests. Beginning in November 2002, TPJ moved to
a reader-supported monthly e-zine format in which subscribers can down-
load issues as PDF documents. For more details on TPJ, see
http://www.tpj.com/
Beyond this, magazines that frequently carry quality articles on Perl
are The Perl Review ( http://www.theperlreview.com ), Unix Review (
http://www.unixreview.com/ ), Linux Magazine ( http://www.linux-
magazine.com/ ), and Usenix's newsletter/magazine to its members,
login: ( http://www.usenix.org/ )
The Perl columns of Randal L. Schwartz are available on the web at
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/ , http://www.stone-
henge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/ , and http://www.stonehenge.com/mer-
lyn/LinuxMag/ .
Perl on the Net: FTP and WWW Access
To get the best performance, pick a site from the list at
http://www.cpan.org/SITES.html . From there you can find the quickest
site for you.
You may also use xx.cpan.org where "xx" is the 2-letter country code
for your domain; e.g. Australia would use au.cpan.org. [Note: This only
applies to countries that host at least one mirror.]
What mailing lists are there for Perl?
Most of the major modules (Tk, CGI, libwww-perl) have their own mailing
lists. Consult the documentation that came with the module for sub-
scription information.
A comprehensive list of Perl related mailing lists can be found at:
http://lists.perl.org/
Archives of comp.lang.perl.misc
The Google search engine now carries archived and searchable newsgroup
content.
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.perl.misc
If you have a question, you can be sure someone has already asked the
same question at some point on c.l.p.m. It requires some time and
patience to sift through all the content but often you will find the
answer you seek.
Where can I buy a commercial version of Perl?
In a real sense, Perl already is commercial software: it has a license
that you can grab and carefully read to your manager. It is distributed
in releases and comes in well-defined packages. There is a very large
user community and an extensive literature. The comp.lang.perl.*
newsgroups and several of the mailing lists provide free answers to
your questions in near real-time. Perl has traditionally been sup-
ported by Larry, scores of software designers and developers, and myr-
iad programmers, all working for free to create a useful thing to make
life better for everyone.
However, these answers may not suffice for managers who require a pur-
chase order from a company whom they can sue should anything go awry.
Or maybe they need very serious hand-holding and contractual obliga-
tions. Shrink-wrapped CDs with Perl on them are available from several
sources if that will help. For example, many Perl books include a dis-
tribution of Perl, as do the O'Reilly Perl Resource Kits (in both the
Unix flavor and in the proprietary Microsoft flavor); the free Unix
distributions also all come with Perl.
Where do I send bug reports?
If you are reporting a bug in the perl interpreter or the modules
shipped with Perl, use the perlbug program in the Perl distribution or
mail your report to perlbug@perl.org .
If you are posting a bug with a non-standard port (see the answer to
"What platforms is Perl available for?"), a binary distribution, or a
non-standard module (such as Tk, CGI, etc), then please see the docu-
mentation that came with it to determine the correct place to post
bugs.
Read the perlbug(1) man page (perl5.004 or later) for more information.
What is perl.com? Perl Mongers? pm.org? perl.org? cpan.org?
Perl.com at http://www.perl.com/ is part of the O'Reilly Network, a
subsidiary of O'Reilly Media.
The Perl Foundation is an advocacy organization for the Perl language
which maintains the web site http://www.perl.org/ as a general advocacy
site for the Perl language. It uses the domain to provide general sup-
port services to the Perl community, including the hosting of mailing
lists, web sites, and other services. The web site
http://www.perl.org/ is a general advocacy site for the Perl language,
and there are many other sub-domains for special topics, such as
http://learn.perl.org/
http://use.perl.org/
http://jobs.perl.org/
http://lists.perl.org/
Perl Mongers uses the pm.org domain for services related to Perl user
groups, including the hosting of mailing lists and web sites. See the
Perl user group web site at http://www.pm.org/ for more information
about joining, starting, or requesting services for a Perl user group.
http://www.cpan.org/ is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a
replicated worlwide repository of Perl software, see the What is CPAN?
question earlier in this document.
AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2001 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. All
rights reserved.
This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here are in the
public domain. You are permitted and encouraged to use this code and
any derivatives thereof in your own programs for fun or for profit as
you see fit. A simple comment in the code giving credit to the FAQ
would be courteous but is not required.
perl v5.8.6 2004-11-05 PERLFAQ2(1)
