1PAR::FAQ(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation PAR::FAQ(3)
2
6 PAR::FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions about PAR
7
9 This is the Frequently Asked Questions list for the Perl Archive
10 Toolkit. You can edit this document at <http://par.perl.org/wiki/FAQ>
11 online. This (included) FAQ list might be outdated. The Wiki version
12 at the above URL is guaranteed to be up to date.
13
15 Where is the Windows binary version?
16 You can find windows binaries here:
17 <http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SM/SMUELLER/>
19 There are three ways to install them. Sorted in order of preference:
21 cpan
23 Run the cpan command line tool that comes with Perl. In the cpan shell,
25 type
26 install PAR
28 and wait for the script to download and extract PAR and its
30 dependencies. If you have a C compiler installed, PAR will be built on
31 your computer for your specific version of Perl. If you do not have a C
32 compiler, the installer will look at the site referenced above for a
33 compatible binary release and ask you whether you would like to install
34 it.
35 ppm
37 If you are using ActivePerl from ActiveState, you can use the 'ppm'
39 program that comes with the ActiveState Perl. Instructions can be found
40 below. PAR is availlable from various PPM repositories and some
41 packages are compatible with some versions of ActivePerl and not with
42 others. There is an incomplete PAR-Win32 Binary Compatibility List at
43 <http://par.wikia.com/wiki/PAR_PPM_Compatibility_List> There are at
44 least three relevant PPM repositories: The default ActiveState one, the
45 bribes repository which is used in the example below and Randy Kobes'
46 repository at <http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/>.
47 C:\> ppm3
49 # activestate was out of date compared to this one
50 % rep add bribes http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm
51 # move it to first place on list of repositories
52 % rep up bribes
53 CPAN>upgrade -install PAR
54 And finally, 'q' to quit and that's all :-) You have access to pp and
56 so on...
57 manual
59 For reference, here's the old explanation of how to install it by hand:
61 The file you need will be called
62 PAR-X.XX-MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-Y.Y.Y.par where X.XX is the version
63 of PAR you will use and Y.Y.Y is the version of Perl you have. Unzip
64 this file (you may need to rename it to end with .zip instead of .par
65 first) and copy all the files in the script directory into a directory
66 in your PATH. Now you should be able to use PAR.
67 Can PAR bundle all its prerequisites?
69 Note: This entry needs serious attention.
70 Yes and no.
72 It would be possible to do this but it would also introduce a
74 maintenance nightmare. A new version of PAR would have to be released
75 whenever a new version of any of the dependencies came out. This is
76 already painful with the included Module::Install.
77 The original proposal which led to this FAQ entry considered the case
79 where you want to install PAR without a working CPAN.pm/CPAN shell
80 installation or without internet connectivity. By default, PAR will try
81 to install its dependencies from CPAN using the CPAN.pm module.
82 Given that you have a development machine with PAR installed and with a
84 working CPAN.pm, it is reasonably simple to create one or more .par
85 distributions of PAR's dependencies. Install PAR::Dist::FromCPAN. Then
86 you can create .par distributions (read: binaries installable with the
87 pure-perl PAR::Dist on the same architecture) for the PAR dependencies
88 as follows:
89 mkdir par_files
91 cpan2par --pattern PAR --follow --out par_files/ --merge --skip File::.*
92 --skip Getopt::Std --skip Carp --skip Data::Dumper --skip Time::Local
93 --skip 'Test\b.*' --skip Text::ParseWords --skip ExtUtils::.*
94 --skip Getopt::Long --skip Text::Abbrev --skip DirHandle --skip Pod::.*
95 (Line breaks inserted for readability.) What happens here? cpan2par
97 uses the API of the CPAN.pm module to fetch the PAR distribution from
98 CPAN, unpacks it, builds it, creates a .par archive from its compiled
99 state and then does the same for any of its dependencies. And then for
100 its dependencies dependencies and... You get the idea. This is what the
101 --follow option does. We add a couple of --skip options to skip core
102 modules which we need not include and any Test::* modules. The --merge
103 option merges all of the .par distributions into the original PAR one.
104 Voila! (Future versions of PAR::Dist::FromCPAN might include an option
105 --skip-core which would skip any modules contained in the core
106 distribution.)
107 After this command worked its magic, you should have a single file
109 PAR-VERSION-ARCHNAME-PERLVERSION.par in the subdirectory 'par_files/'.
110 You can now install PAR and its non-core dependencies on any machine
111 that has the architecture of your development system (and a binary
112 compatible perl version) using PAR::Dist as follows:
113 perl -MPAR::Dist -einstall_par
115 Provided that you run the command from within the directory containing
117 the aforementioned .par file (and no other .par file).
118 Since you might not even have PAR::Dist on the target machine, you can
120 do this simple hack to get a basic installer:
121 perl -MPAR::Dist -e'open my $fh, "<", $INC{"PAR/Dist.pm"}; print <$fh>;
123 print "\npackage main;\nPAR::Dist::install_par(\@ARGV ? shift(\@ARGV)
124 : ());\n\n"'
125 > installer.pl
126 (Again: Line breaks inserted for readability.) This looks for your
128 installed copy of PAR::Dist, reads it, writes it to STDOUT and appends
129 two lines of code: "package main;" and a call to
130 PAR::Dist::install_par. By default, it will install any (single) .par
131 file in the current directory. If supplied with a file name as first
132 argument, it will install the specified file. It should have no non-
133 core dependencies! So shipping the generated PAR-....par file and the
134 installer.pl file to the target machine and running "perl installer.pl"
135 should just magically install PAR and its dependencies for you.
136 Now, this whole trick works equally well for any other modules. In
138 fact, if you have PAR on the target machine, you needn't even install
139 the modules in the .par file in order to use them! You can just add
140 "use PAR 'foo-bar.par';" to your code and any modules will be loaded
141 from the .par file as necessary. ("perl -MPAR=foo-bar.par
142 your_script.pl" works, too.) The documentation of the PAR module has
143 details on this.
144 Finally, note that you can install PAR::Repository::Client on the
146 target machines and subsequently use PAR 0.951 and later to
147 automatically fetch any unfulfilled dependencies from a (remote or
148 local) repository:
149 use PAR { repository => 'http://my_local_secure_host/repository' };
151 or:
153 use PAR { repository => 'file:///path/to/repository' };
155 Details, again, in the PAR documentation and in the
157 PAR::Repository::Client documentation.
158 Answer from: Steffen Mueller, 16 August 2006
160 If I try to compile my wxGlade generated script, it doesn't run. What's
162 wrong?
163 Note: Is this still a problem?
164 Comment out the line that starts with " unless (caller) ", and compile
166 it again. Note that this is considered a bug; clearing the caller stack
167 is a development in progress. See:
168 <http://par.perl.org/wiki/Development_in_progress>
169 I get a link error '/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lperl' during the 'make' step
171 of the installation on Debian. What's wrong?
172 This is a common problem when building compiled libraries on Debian
173 distribution installations with the default perl package. To fix this
174 problem, create a symbolic link from libperl.so.5.6.1 to libperl.so in
175 /usr/lib (cd /usr/lib; ln -s libperl.so.5.6.1 libperl.so) and re-run
176 the 'make' step of the installation. Or install libperl-dev
177 I specify a .ico file with --icon for Win32, but the icon is still the
179 black and white camel. What's wrong?
180 Unlike Perl2EXE, which can use a standard 16-color bitmap as an
181 application icon, PAR requires a true Windows icon file. Download a
182 trial version of Microangelo and use that to create your .ico file. The
183 latest Netpbm tools at <http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/> has
184 ppmtowinicon, which can tack a pbm and convert it to a windows icon. It
185 is open source and has win32 ports.
186 Gimp for Windows can also create Windows icon files
188 http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/ <http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/>.
189 I added a directory to my PAR file using "zip -r" or winzip, and then
191 generated an executable from this PAR file, and the executable failed
192 to run (IO error: reading header signature :..). What's wrong?
193 As pointed out by Alan Stewart, zip adds a directory entry for the new
194 directory, and it causes the PAR executable to fail. Just use :
195 zip -r -D hello.par my_dir/
197 or the Archive::Zip::addTree as follows :
199 $zip->addTree( $root, $dest, sub { -f } )
201 On what platforms can I run PAR? On what platforms will the resulting
203 executable run?
204 Win32 (95/98/ME/NT4/2K/XP), FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, Solaris, Darwin and
205 Cygwin.
206 The resulting executable will run on any platforms that supports the
208 binary format of the generating platform.
209 How do I extract my script out of packed executable?
211 In other words, "I did a `pp foo.pl' and I lost foo.pl, how do I get it
212 back?".
213 The answer is to just use unzip/winzip/winrar/whatever to decompress
215 the executable, treating it like a normal Zip file. You may need to
216 rename the executable into a .zip extension first.
217 Can PAR completely hide my source code?
219 Not completely, but possible to a degree. Starting from version 0.76,
220 PAR supports an input filter mechanism, which can be used to implement
221 source obfuscators (or even product activation schemes).
222 But if you are looking for 100% bulletproof way of hiding source code,
224 it is not possible with any language. Learning Perl, 3rd Edition has
225 this answer to offer (quoted with permission from Randal Schwartz):
226 If you're wishing for an opaque binary, though, we have to tell you
228 that they don't exist. If someone can install and run your program,
229 they can turn it back into source code. Granted, this won't necessarily
230 be the same source that you started with, but it will be some kind of
231 source code. The real way to keep your secret algorithm a secret is,
232 alas, to apply the proper number of attorneys; they can write a license
233 that says "you can do this with the code, but you can't do that. And if
234 you break our rules, we've got the proper number of attorneys to ensure
235 that you'll regret it."
236 Other than that, I would point you at PAR::Filter::Crypto. Be sure to
238 read the CAVEATS and WARNINGS sections of the documentation.
239 On Windows XP, pp crashes saying that "par.exe has encountered a problem"
241 This is believed to be fixed by PAR 0.76_99. The following answer
242 applies to PAR 0.76 and earlier:
243 You may be able to escape this problem by setting some executables to
245 Windows 95 compatibility mode. Specifically, find "parl.exe" (probably
246 in "C:\perl\5.8.0\bin") using Windows Explorer, and right-click on it
247 and choose "Properties". Choose the "Compatibility" tab and tick the
248 box for "Run this program with compatibility mode for" and check that
249 the dropdown shows "Windows 95". Then click OK.
250 Now you can hopefully run pp as normal to generate an EXE. Before you
252 can run the generated EXE, you'll need to set its compatibility mode
253 too, in the same way as you did for parl.exe.
254 This workaround is known not to work in all cases, and the developers
256 are working on a solution to the problem. See these posts for more
257 info:
258 http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00423.html
260 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00423.html>,
261 http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00435.html
262 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00435.html>,
263 http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00573.html
264 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00573.html>,
265 http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00670.html
266 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00670.html>
267 Perl Tk tips
269 On Windows XP start your script with
270 use strict; use Encode::Unicode; use Tk;
272 Some widgets use xbm bitmaps which don't get picked up by PAR. The
274 error is:
275 couldn't read bitmap file "": No such file or directory
277 error reading bitmap file "" at Tk/Widget.pm line 205.
278 at Tk/Widget.pm line 203
279 Fix is to find the missing xbm files (perl -V tells you where to start
281 looking) and add them to the executable eg
282 copy missing xbm files to script directory then:
284 % pp --add cbxarrow.xbm --add arrowdownwin.xbm -o test test.pl
286 Problem with Win32::Perms and Perms.DLL
288 With a script my.pl using Win32::Perms, pp -o my.exe my.pl you may
289 have:
290 Can't locate loadable object for module Win32::Perms in @INC
292 (@INC contains: CODE(0xb97eec) CODE(0xc8a99c) .)
293 at ../blib/lib/PAR/Heavy.pm line 78
294 In fact the dll is Perms.DLL wit DLL in capital letters. That's the
296 problem. The bootstrap function of PAR in the Dynaloader module fails
297 looking for Perms.dll in the table of dlls which contains only
298 Perms.DLL. And so the solution is just rename Perms.DLL in Perms.dll
299 and do pp -o my.exe my.pl ... and everything goes right.
300 Under Win32, a pp packed executable has trouble executing other perl
302 scripts or pp packed executable
303 Note: Is this still current?
304 When running on a Win32 system, if a perl script is packed with pp and
306 invokes another Perl script or pp packed executable, either with
307 system() or backticks, the invoked program runs with the copy of
308 perl5x.dll already loaded into memory. If the calling executable was
309 packed with "pp -d", the perl5x.dll is the one from the installed perl
310 bin directory. Otherwise, it is the one packed with the executable. The
311 perl5x.dll from the bin dir knows the @INC paths for the installed
312 libraries; the one in the executable does not. Because of this, a
313 program packed without "-d" calling a program with packed with "-d" or
314 calling perl.exe to run a plain Perl script may fail. This is a Win32
315 limitation.
316 How can I make a .exe that runs with no console window under Windows?
318 Use the --gui switch, ie
319 % pp --gui -o file.exe file.pl
321 I found that this is not documented on all versions of pp ... Some
323 versions have a more complete doc than others when you type "pp -h"
324 etc. (This should be reasonably documented now.)
325 When searching for an answer to this myself, I found many references to
327 using "exetype" ... it comes as a .bat with ActivePerl, or you can find
328 an exetype.pl from several places. You run "exetype file.exe
329 [WINDOWS|CONSOLE]". This worked, I think, but still did not achieve the
330 desired result on my PAR executable. While the exe itself did not
331 generate a console window, par.exe (which was invoked in my exe
332 somewhere) DID generate a console window, with a titlebar saying
333 "par.exe <strange-looking path to file in temp dir>", whereas before
334 changing the console window title bar just displayed the path to my
335 .exe.
336 How can I change the icon of the generated .exe file under Windows?
338 There is another not-completely-documented switch that only works on
339 windows, aXXicon MyIcon.ico. So just use this:
340 % pp --icon "c:\path to\MyIcon.ico" -o file.exe file.pl.
342 (This should also be documented now?)
344 The command line parameters (@ARGV) of a pp-ed binary called from another
346 pp-ed binary are missing or broken. What the...?
347 This was a bug in releases up to and incuding PAR-0.90. Please upgrade
348 to PAR 0.91 or later and the problem will go away.
349 I want to include a pp-ed binary in an RPM package. How can I make this
351 work?
352 The binary executables outputted by pp (on Linux) are not valid ELF
353 binaries because it basically attaches a zip archive to the binary
354 loader and does not modify the ELF headers to reflect that. When
355 building an RPM archive, the validity of the ELF headers is checked by
356 default. This can result in problems when packaging pp-ed binaries in
357 RPM archives.
358 Scott McBrien helped track down what can be done to get this to work:
360 [I]t appears that the RPM archive that is generated gets a list of
362 the MD5 sums for components of the executable file calculated by
363 prelink. By disabling prelink, it fixed the problem; in my RPM .spec
364 file:
365 %define __prelink_undo_cmd %{nil}
366 After quite some time, it seems like the smart folks at Redhat found
368 the culprit. I'm glad *they* did, because I wouldn't have:
369 It appears that we found a solution that works. It like the pp
371 executables are already stripped, so we don't want rpm stripping them
372 again, which, of course, renders them useless.
373 In this case, we added the following lines to the spec file to keep rpm
375 from running the strip process and not produce debuginfo packages:
376 %define __spec_install_post :
378 %define debug_package %{nil}
379 Don't forget to add the ":" character to __spec_install_post as above or
381 this won't work.
382 Much praise to all who helped track this down! The discussion can be
384 found in the following RT tickets:
385 "/rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=18536 #18536" in http: and
386 "/rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=19609 #19609" in http:.
387 -- Steffen Mueller, 22 July 2006
389 How can I package Wx applications?
391 Have a look at the separately maintained Wx::Perl::Packager module.
392 -- Steffen Mueller, 3 July 2006
394 How can I package Catalyst web applications?
396 Catalyst has some builtin PAR support. I found the following URL to be
397 very helpful:
398 <http://catalyst.infogami.com/cookbook/par>.
400 -- Steffen Mueller, 21 July 2006
402 The resulting files are huge! How can I reduce the size of the output file?
404 The executables generated by pp generally contain a copy of your Perl
405 shared libraries, the Perl core modules and any module dependencies
406 your packaged application may have. That is a lot. Sometimes, PAR
407 packages too much. It adheres to the philosophy of rather making the
408 application work than generating a streamlined executable. If you want
409 to optimize this, you will have to do so by excluding specific modules.
410 Chris Dolan's recent post to the PAR mailing list explains this well.
412 Quoting Chris: (<http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.par/2490>)
413 [...]
415 I've found a few tricks that can help a lot:
416 * If you know the target platform has Perl pre-installed (e.g. Mac OS X)
418 then use the "--dependent" flag. This skips all of the core modules,
419 yielding a much smaller executable.
420 One significant caveat is moving to older systems. For example,
422 Mac OS X 10.2 had Perl 5.6.0 which has 146 fewer core modules than
423 Perl 5.8.6 which shipped with Mac OS X 10.4, and (even more significantly)
424 is binary-incompatible with any extra XS modules added from CPAN.
425 Other platforms can be even harder to predict.
426 * Watch for modules that pull in lots of dependencies
428 A good example is DBI. If your program uses DBI, then Module::ScanDeps
430 pulls in ALL of the DBD::* modules (some of which are large) installed on
431 your system, because it cannot realistically parse the DBI->connect()
432 arguments which specify which database drivers are actually needed.
433 In one of my MySQL-based applications, I use this invocation of PAR:
434 pp -X DBD::SQLite -X DBD::CSV -X DBD::File -X DBD::Excel
436 which saves quite a few bytes, because both DBD::SQLite and DBD::Excel
438 have lots of CPAN dependencies. The actual list if DBD::* modules you
439 need to exclude depends on your system. Here's a short command that will
440 reveal all DBD::* modules on a unix-like system:
441 perl -MModule::ScanDeps -le'print for map {"DBD/".$_->{name}} Module::ScanDeps::_glob_in_inc("DBD")'
443 Another smaller example is SOAP::Transport::* where most installations
445 only need SOAP::Transport::HTTP.
446 [...]
447 Similar techniques can be applied when a module makes use of
449 Module::Pluggable for plugins.
450 Finally, there is a PAR filter available as a separate distribution on
452 CPAN which compresses the source code as much as possible by first
453 parsing it using PPI and then spitting out a reduced functional
454 equivalent: PAR::Filter::Squish.
455 -- Steffen Mueller, August 2006
457 How do I use Win32::GUI::SplashScreen with PAR?
459 When using pp to package an application that uses
460 Win32::GUI::SplashScreen, try adding the splashscreen bitmap manually
461 as suggested in the Win32::GUI::SplashScreen docs:
462 pp -a SPLASHFILE.bmp -o xxx.exe xxx.pl
464 The Perl Packager scripts says that it can create executable that runs in
466 same OS. Can I use it to create Win32 binary with linux machine? Or
467 what should I use to create Win32 executable binary on linux from my
468 script?
469 It is not possible to create stand-alone binaries for different
470 platform than what you are currently running on. This is a generally
471 hard problem since you would have to cross-compile all XS modules and
472 perl itself. Not nice.
473 For example, if you would like to develop an application on Linux and
475 ship it for both Linux/x86 and Win32/x86, it works well to set up a
476 Virtual Machine with a Windows (XP or 2000 or whatever) and a Perl
477 installation. On that machine, use PAR/pp to package your application
478 for Win32.
479 See also the question "On what platforms can I run PAR? On what
481 platforms will the resulting executable run?".
482 -- Steffen Mueller, 2 November 2006
484
486 PAR, PAR::Tutorial
487
489 Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>, Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org>
490 <http://par.perl.org/> is the official PAR website. You can write to
492 the mailing list at <par@perl.org>, or send an empty mail to
493 <par-subscribe@perl.org> to participate in the discussion.
494 Please submit bug reports to <bug-par@rt.cpan.org>.
496
498 Copyright 2003-2008 by Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>.
499 This document is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
501 modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
502 See <http://www.perl.com/perl/misc/Artistic.html>
504perl v5.12.1 2010-04-10 PAR::FAQ(3)