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. This (included) FAQ list might be outdated. The Wiki version
11 at the above URL is guaranteed to be up to date.
12
14 Where is the Windows binary version?
15 You can find windows binaries here:
16 <http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/S/SM/SMUELLER/>
18 There are three ways to install them. Sorted in order of preference:
20 cpan
22 Run the cpan command line tool that comes with Perl. In the cpan shell,
24 type
25 install PAR
27 and wait for the script to download and extract PAR and its
29 dependencies. If you have a C compiler installed, PAR will be built on
30 your computer for your specific version of Perl. If you do not have a C
31 compiler, the installer will look at the site referenced above for a
32 compatible binary release and ask you whether you would like to install
33 it.
34 ppm
36 If you are using ActivePerl from ActiveState, you can use the 'ppm'
38 program that comes with the ActiveState Perl. Instructions can be found
39 below. PAR is available from various PPM repositories and some packages
40 are compatible with some versions of ActivePerl and not with others.
41 There is an incomplete PAR-Win32 Binary Compatibility List at
42 <http://par.wikia.com/wiki/PAR_PPM_Compatibility_List> There are at
43 least three relevant PPM repositories: The default ActiveState one, the
44 bribes repository which is used in the example below and Randy Kobes'
45 repository at <http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms/>.
46 C:\> ppm3
48 # activestate was out of date compared to this one
49 % rep add bribes http://www.bribes.org/perl/ppm
50 # move it to first place on list of repositories
51 % rep up bribes
52 CPAN>upgrade -install PAR
53 And finally, 'q' to quit and that's all :-) You have access to pp and
55 so on...
56 manual
58 For reference, here's the old explanation of how to install it by hand:
60 The file you need will be called
61 PAR-X.XX-MSWin32-x86-multi-thread-Y.Y.Y.par where X.XX is the version
62 of PAR you will use and Y.Y.Y is the version of Perl you have. Unzip
63 this file (you may need to rename it to end with .zip instead of .par
64 first) and copy all the files in the script directory into a directory
65 in your PATH. Now you should be able to use PAR.
66 Can PAR bundle all its prerequisites?
68 Note: This entry needs serious attention.
69 Yes and no.
71 It would be possible to do this but it would also introduce a
73 maintenance nightmare. A new version of PAR would have to be released
74 whenever a new version of any of the dependencies came out. This is
75 already painful with the included Module::Install.
76 The original proposal which led to this FAQ entry considered the case
78 where you want to install PAR without a working CPAN.pm/CPAN shell
79 installation or without internet connectivity. By default, PAR will try
80 to install its dependencies from CPAN using the CPAN.pm module.
81 Given that you have a development machine with PAR installed and with a
83 working CPAN.pm, it is reasonably simple to create one or more .par
84 distributions of PAR's dependencies. Install PAR::Dist::FromCPAN. Then
85 you can create .par distributions (read: binaries installable with the
86 pure-perl PAR::Dist on the same architecture) for the PAR dependencies
87 as follows:
88 mkdir par_files
90 cpan2par --pattern PAR --follow --out par_files/ --merge --skip File::.*
91 --skip Getopt::Std --skip Carp --skip Data::Dumper --skip Time::Local
92 --skip 'Test\b.*' --skip Text::ParseWords --skip ExtUtils::.*
93 --skip Getopt::Long --skip Text::Abbrev --skip DirHandle --skip Pod::.*
94 (Line breaks inserted for readability.) What happens here? cpan2par
96 uses the API of the CPAN.pm module to fetch the PAR distribution from
97 CPAN, unpacks it, builds it, creates a .par archive from its compiled
98 state and then does the same for any of its dependencies. And then for
99 its dependencies dependencies and... You get the idea. This is what the
100 --follow option does. We add a couple of --skip options to skip core
101 modules which we need not include and any Test::* modules. The --merge
102 option merges all of the .par distributions into the original PAR one.
103 Voila! (Future versions of PAR::Dist::FromCPAN might include an option
104 --skip-core which would skip any modules contained in the core
105 distribution.)
106 After this command worked its magic, you should have a single file
108 PAR-VERSION-ARCHNAME-PERLVERSION.par in the subdirectory 'par_files/'.
109 You can now install PAR and its non-core dependencies on any machine
110 that has the architecture of your development system (and a binary
111 compatible perl version) using PAR::Dist as follows:
112 perl -MPAR::Dist -einstall_par
114 Provided that you run the command from within the directory containing
116 the aforementioned .par file (and no other .par file).
117 Since you might not even have PAR::Dist on the target machine, you can
119 do this simple hack to get a basic installer:
120 perl -MPAR::Dist -e'open my $fh, "<", $INC{"PAR/Dist.pm"}; print <$fh>;
122 print "\npackage main;\nPAR::Dist::install_par(\@ARGV ? shift(\@ARGV)
123 : ());\n\n"'
124 > installer.pl
125 (Again: Line breaks inserted for readability.) This looks for your
127 installed copy of PAR::Dist, reads it, writes it to STDOUT and appends
128 two lines of code: "package main;" and a call to
129 PAR::Dist::install_par. By default, it will install any (single) .par
130 file in the current directory. If supplied with a file name as first
131 argument, it will install the specified file. It should have no non-
132 core dependencies! So shipping the generated PAR-....par file and the
133 installer.pl file to the target machine and running "perl installer.pl"
134 should just magically install PAR and its dependencies for you.
135 Now, this whole trick works equally well for any other modules. In
137 fact, if you have PAR on the target machine, you needn't even install
138 the modules in the .par file in order to use them! You can just add
139 "use PAR 'foo-bar.par';" to your code and any modules will be loaded
140 from the .par file as necessary. ("perl -MPAR=foo-bar.par
141 your_script.pl" works, too.) The documentation of the PAR module has
142 details on this.
143 Finally, note that you can install PAR::Repository::Client on the
145 target machines and subsequently use PAR 0.951 and later to
146 automatically fetch any unfulfilled dependencies from a (remote or
147 local) repository:
148 use PAR { repository => 'http://my_local_secure_host/repository' };
150 or:
152 use PAR { repository => 'file:///path/to/repository' };
154 Details, again, in the PAR documentation and in the
156 PAR::Repository::Client documentation.
157 Answer from: Steffen Mueller, 16 August 2006
159 If I try to compile my wxGlade generated script, it doesn't run. What's
161 wrong?
162 Note: Is this still a problem?
163 Comment out the line that starts with " unless (caller) ", and compile
165 it again. Note that this is considered a bug; clearing the caller stack
166 is a development in progress.
167 I get a link error '/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lperl' during the 'make' step
169 of the installation on Debian. What's wrong?
170 Install the "libperl-dev" package.
171 Note that Debian provides (usually up-to-date) packages of the modules
173 in the PAR ecosystem: Module::Scandeps, PAR, PAR::Dist and PAR::Packer;
174 the corresponding packages are called "libmodule-scandeps-perl",
175 "libpar-dist-perl", "libpar-perl" and "libpar-packer-perl".
176 I specify a .ico file with --icon for Win32, but the icon is still the
178 black and white camel. What's wrong?
179 Unlike Perl2EXE, which can use a standard 16-color bitmap as an
180 application icon, PAR requires a true Windows icon file. Download a
181 trial version of Microangelo and use that to create your .ico file. The
182 latest Netpbm tools at <http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/> has
183 ppmtowinicon, which can tack a pbm and convert it to a windows icon. It
184 is open source and has win32 ports.
185 Gimp for Windows can also create Windows icon files
187 <http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/>.
188 I added a directory to my PAR file using "zip -r" or winzip, and then
190 generated an executable from this PAR file, and the executable failed
191 to run (IO error: reading header signature :..). What's wrong?
192 As pointed out by Alan Stewart, zip adds a directory entry for the new
193 directory, and it causes the PAR executable to fail. Just use :
194 zip -r -D hello.par my_dir/
196 or the Archive::Zip::addTree as follows :
198 $zip->addTree( $root, $dest, sub { -f } )
200 On what platforms can I run PAR? On what platforms will the resulting
202 executable run?
203 Win32 (95/98/ME/NT4/2K/XP), FreeBSD, Linux, AIX, Solaris, Darwin and
204 Cygwin.
205 The resulting executable will run on any platforms that supports the
207 binary format of the generating platform.
208 How do I extract my script out of packed executable?
210 In other words, "I did a `pp foo.pl' and I lost foo.pl, how do I get it
211 back?".
212 The answer is to just use unzip/winzip/winrar/whatever to decompress
214 the executable, treating it like a normal Zip file. You may need to
215 rename the executable into a .zip extension first.
216 Can PAR completely hide my source code?
218 Not completely, but possible to a degree. Starting from version 0.76,
219 PAR supports an input filter mechanism, which can be used to implement
220 source obfuscators (or even product activation schemes).
221 But if you are looking for 100% bulletproof way of hiding source code,
223 it is not possible with any language. Learning Perl, 3rd Edition has
224 this answer to offer (quoted with permission from Randal Schwartz):
225 If you're wishing for an opaque binary, though, we have to tell you
227 that they don't exist. If someone can install and run your program,
228 they can turn it back into source code. Granted, this won't necessarily
229 be the same source that you started with, but it will be some kind of
230 source code. The real way to keep your secret algorithm a secret is,
231 alas, to apply the proper number of attorneys; they can write a license
232 that says "you can do this with the code, but you can't do that. And if
233 you break our rules, we've got the proper number of attorneys to ensure
234 that you'll regret it."
235 Other than that, I would point you at PAR::Filter::Crypto. Be sure to
237 read the CAVEATS and WARNINGS sections of the documentation.
238 On Windows XP, pp crashes saying that "par.exe has encountered a problem"
240 This is believed to be fixed by PAR 0.76_99. The following answer
241 applies to PAR 0.76 and earlier:
242 You may be able to escape this problem by setting some executables to
244 Windows 95 compatibility mode. Specifically, find "parl.exe" (probably
245 in "C:\perl\5.8.0\bin") using Windows Explorer, and right-click on it
246 and choose "Properties". Choose the "Compatibility" tab and tick the
247 box for "Run this program with compatibility mode for" and check that
248 the dropdown shows "Windows 95". Then click OK.
249 Now you can hopefully run pp as normal to generate an EXE. Before you
251 can run the generated EXE, you'll need to set its compatibility mode
252 too, in the same way as you did for parl.exe.
253 This workaround is known not to work in all cases, and the developers
255 are working on a solution to the problem. See these posts for more
256 info:
257 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00423.html>,
259 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00435.html>,
260 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00573.html>,
261 <http://www.mail-archive.com/par@perl.org/msg00670.html>
262 Perl Tk tips
264 On Windows XP start your script with
265 use strict; use Encode::Unicode; use Tk;
267 Some widgets use xbm bitmaps which don't get picked up by PAR. The
269 error is:
270 couldn't read bitmap file "": No such file or directory
272 error reading bitmap file "" at Tk/Widget.pm line 205.
273 at Tk/Widget.pm line 203
274 Fix is to find the missing xbm files (perl -V tells you where to start
276 looking) and add them to the executable eg
277 copy missing xbm files to script directory then:
279 % pp --add cbxarrow.xbm --add arrowdownwin.xbm -o test test.pl
281 Problem with Win32::Perms and Perms.DLL
283 With a script my.pl using Win32::Perms, pp -o my.exe my.pl you may
284 have:
285 Can't locate loadable object for module Win32::Perms in @INC
287 (@INC contains: CODE(0xb97eec) CODE(0xc8a99c) .)
288 at ../blib/lib/PAR/Heavy.pm line 78
289 In fact the dll is Perms.DLL wit DLL in capital letters. That's the
291 problem. The bootstrap function of PAR in the Dynaloader module fails
292 looking for Perms.dll in the table of dlls which contains only
293 Perms.DLL. And so the solution is just rename Perms.DLL in Perms.dll
294 and do pp -o my.exe my.pl ... and everything goes right.
295 Under Win32, a pp packed executable has trouble executing other perl
297 scripts or pp packed executable
298 Note: Is this still current?
299 When running on a Win32 system, if a perl script is packed with pp and
301 invokes another Perl script or pp packed executable, either with
302 system() or backticks, the invoked program runs with the copy of
303 perl5x.dll already loaded into memory. If the calling executable was
304 packed with "pp -d", the perl5x.dll is the one from the installed perl
305 bin directory. Otherwise, it is the one packed with the executable. The
306 perl5x.dll from the bin dir knows the @INC paths for the installed
307 libraries; the one in the executable does not. Because of this, a
308 program packed without "-d" calling a program with packed with "-d" or
309 calling perl.exe to run a plain Perl script may fail. This is a Win32
310 limitation.
311 How can I make a .exe that runs with no console window under Windows?
313 Use the --gui switch, ie
314 % pp --gui -o file.exe file.pl
316 I found that this is not documented on all versions of pp ... Some
318 versions have a more complete doc than others when you type "pp -h"
319 etc. (This should be reasonably documented now.)
320 When searching for an answer to this myself, I found many references to
322 using "exetype" ... it comes as a .bat with ActivePerl, or you can find
323 an exetype.pl from several places. You run "exetype file.exe
324 [WINDOWS|CONSOLE]". This worked, I think, but still did not achieve the
325 desired result on my PAR executable. While the exe itself did not
326 generate a console window, par.exe (which was invoked in my exe
327 somewhere) DID generate a console window, with a titlebar saying
328 "par.exe <strange-looking path to file in temp dir>", whereas before
329 changing the console window title bar just displayed the path to my
330 .exe.
331 How can I change the icon of the generated .exe file under Windows?
333 There is another not-completely-documented switch that only works on
334 windows, --icon MyIcon.ico. So just use this:
335 % pp --icon "c:\path to\MyIcon.ico" -o file.exe file.pl.
337 (This should also be documented now?)
339 The command line parameters (@ARGV) of a pp-ed binary called from another
341 pp-ed binary are missing or broken. What the...?
342 This was a bug in releases up to and including PAR-0.90. Please upgrade
343 to PAR 0.91 or later and the problem will go away.
344 I want to include a pp-ed binary in an RPM package. How can I make this
346 work?
347 The binary executables outputted by pp (on Linux) are not valid ELF
348 binaries because it basically attaches a zip archive to the binary
349 loader and does not modify the ELF headers to reflect that. When
350 building an RPM archive, the validity of the ELF headers is checked by
351 default. This can result in problems when packaging pp-ed binaries in
352 RPM archives.
353 Scott McBrien helped track down what can be done to get this to work:
355 [I]t appears that the RPM archive that is generated gets a list of
357 the MD5 sums for components of the executable file calculated by
358 prelink. By disabling prelink, it fixed the problem; in my RPM .spec
359 file:
360 %define __prelink_undo_cmd %{nil}
361 After quite some time, it seems like the smart folks at Redhat found
363 the culprit. I'm glad *they* did, because I wouldn't have:
364 It appears that we found a solution that works. It like the pp
366 executables are already stripped, so we don't want rpm stripping them
367 again, which, of course, renders them useless.
368 In this case, we added the following lines to the spec file to keep rpm
370 from running the strip process and not produce debuginfo packages:
371 %define __spec_install_post :
373 %define debug_package %{nil}
374 Don't forget to add the ":" character to __spec_install_post as above or
376 this won't work.
377 Much praise to all who helped track this down! The discussion can be
379 found in the following RT tickets:
380 <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=18536|#18536> and
381 <http://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=19609|#19609>.
382 -- Steffen Mueller, 22 July 2006
384 How can I package Wx applications?
386 Have a look at the separately maintained Wx::Perl::Packager module.
387 -- Steffen Mueller, 3 July 2006
389 How can I package Catalyst web applications?
391 Catalyst has some builtin PAR support. I found the following URL to be
392 very helpful:
393 <http://catalyst.infogami.com/cookbook/par>.
395 -- Steffen Mueller, 21 July 2006
397 The resulting files are huge! How can I reduce the size of the output file?
399 The executables generated by pp generally contain a copy of your Perl
400 shared libraries, the Perl core modules and any module dependencies
401 your packaged application may have. That is a lot. Sometimes, PAR
402 packages too much. It adheres to the philosophy of rather making the
403 application work than generating a streamlined executable. If you want
404 to optimize this, you will have to do so by excluding specific modules.
405 Chris Dolan's recent post to the PAR mailing list explains this well.
407 Quoting Chris: (<http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.par/2490>)
408 [...]
410 I've found a few tricks that can help a lot:
411 * If you know the target platform has Perl pre-installed (e.g. Mac OS X)
413 then use the "--dependent" flag. This skips all of the core modules,
414 yielding a much smaller executable.
415 One significant caveat is moving to older systems. For example,
417 Mac OS X 10.2 had Perl 5.6.0 which has 146 fewer core modules than
418 Perl 5.8.6 which shipped with Mac OS X 10.4, and (even more significantly)
419 is binary-incompatible with any extra XS modules added from CPAN.
420 Other platforms can be even harder to predict.
421 * Watch for modules that pull in lots of dependencies
423 A good example is DBI. If your program uses DBI, then Module::ScanDeps
425 pulls in ALL of the DBD::* modules (some of which are large) installed on
426 your system, because it cannot realistically parse the DBI->connect()
427 arguments which specify which database drivers are actually needed.
428 In one of my MySQL-based applications, I use this invocation of PAR:
429 pp -X DBD::SQLite -X DBD::CSV -X DBD::File -X DBD::Excel
431 which saves quite a few bytes, because both DBD::SQLite and DBD::Excel
433 have lots of CPAN dependencies. The actual list if DBD::* modules you
434 need to exclude depends on your system. Here's a short command that will
435 reveal all DBD::* modules on a unix-like system:
436 perl -MModule::ScanDeps -le'print for map {"DBD/".$_->{name}} Module::ScanDeps::_glob_in_inc("DBD")'
438 Another smaller example is SOAP::Transport::* where most installations
440 only need SOAP::Transport::HTTP.
441 [...]
442 Similar techniques can be applied when a module makes use of
444 Module::Pluggable for plugins.
445 Finally, there is a PAR filter available as a separate distribution on
447 CPAN which compresses the source code as much as possible by first
448 parsing it using PPI and then spitting out a reduced functional
449 equivalent: PAR::Filter::Squish.
450 -- Steffen Mueller, August 2006
452 How do I use Win32::GUI::SplashScreen with PAR?
454 When using pp to package an application that uses
455 Win32::GUI::SplashScreen, try adding the splashscreen bitmap manually
456 as suggested in the Win32::GUI::SplashScreen docs:
457 pp -a SPLASHFILE.bmp -o xxx.exe xxx.pl
459 The Perl Packager scripts says that it can create executable that runs in
461 same OS. Can I use it to create Win32 binary with linux machine? Or
462 what should I use to create Win32 executable binary on linux from my
463 script?
464 It is not possible to create stand-alone binaries for different
465 platform than what you are currently running on. This is a generally
466 hard problem since you would have to cross-compile all XS modules and
467 perl itself. Not nice.
468 For example, if you would like to develop an application on Linux and
470 ship it for both Linux/x86 and Win32/x86, it works well to set up a
471 Virtual Machine with a Windows (XP or 2000 or whatever) and a Perl
472 installation. On that machine, use PAR/pp to package your application
473 for Win32.
474 See also the question "On what platforms can I run PAR? On what
476 platforms will the resulting executable run?".
477 -- Steffen Mueller, 2 November 2006
479
481 PAR, PAR::Tutorial
482
484 Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>, Steffen Mueller <smueller@cpan.org>
485 You can write to the mailing list at <par@perl.org>, or send an empty
487 mail to <par-subscribe@perl.org> to participate in the discussion.
488 Please submit bug reports to <bug-par@rt.cpan.org>.
490
492 Copyright 2003-2008 by Audrey Tang <cpan@audreyt.org>.
493 This document is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
495 modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
496 See LICENSE.
498perl v5.30.0 2019-07-26 PAR::FAQ(3)