1PERLUTIL(1)            Perl Programmers Reference Guide            PERLUTIL(1)
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NAME

6       perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
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DESCRIPTION

9       Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribution installs
10       a range of utilities on your system. There are also several utilities
11       which are used by the Perl distribution itself as part of the install
12       process. This document exists to list all of these utilities, explain
13       what they are for and provide pointers to each module's documentation,
14       if appropriate.
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LIST OF UTILITIES

17   Documentation
18       perldoc
19          The main interface to Perl's documentation is "perldoc", although if
20          you're reading this, it's more than likely that you've already found
21          it. perldoc will extract and format the documentation from any file
22          in the current directory, any Perl module installed on the system,
23          or any of the standard documentation pages, such as this one. Use
24          "perldoc <name>" to get information on any of the utilities
25          described in this document.
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27       pod2man and pod2text
28          If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call pod2man to
29          translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see perlpod for an
30          explanation) into a manpage, and then run man to display it; if man
31          isn't available, pod2text will be used instead and the output piped
32          through your favourite pager.
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34       pod2html
35          As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will
36          produce HTML pages from POD.
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38       pod2usage
39          If you just want to know how to use the utilities described here,
40          pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE" section; some of the
41          utilities will automatically call pod2usage on themselves when you
42          call them with "-help".
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44       podselect
45          pod2usage is a special case of podselect, a utility to extract named
46          sections from documents written in POD. For instance, while
47          utilities have "USAGE" sections, Perl modules usually have
48          "SYNOPSIS" sections: "podselect -s "SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this
49          section for a given file.
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51       podchecker
52          If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker
53          utility will look for errors in your markup.
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55       splain
56          splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to
57          it, and it'll explain it for you.
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59       "roffitall"
60          The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your system but lives in
61          the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the
62          documentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a
63          typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
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65   Converters
66       To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm
67       utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style
68       Perl5 modules.
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70   Administration
71       libnetcfg
72          To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
73          command.
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75       perlivp
76          The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test
77          the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running
78          "make install" (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify
79          that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.
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81   Development
82       There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl
83       programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
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85       perlbug
86          perlbug used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl
87          interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to
88          the developers; bug reports and patches should now be submitted to
89          <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>.
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91       perlthanks
92          This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back
93          to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed
94          under another name.
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96       h2ph
97          Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
98          programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
99          header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar
100          around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the
101          corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to
102          convert a whole bunch of header files at once.
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104       h2xs
105          h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
106          as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's
107          also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
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109       enc2xs
110          enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode
111          Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
112          Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode
113          module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
114          knowledge of XS is necessary.
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116       xsubpp
117          xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.  It is
118          typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
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120          xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
121          necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the
122          glue necessary to let Perl access those functions.
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124       prove
125          prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality
126          of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative to "make test".
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128       corelist
129          A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to query what
130          modules were shipped with given versions of perl.
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132   General tools
133       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
134       came along modules included in the perl distribution.
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136       piconv
137          piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding converter
138          widely available for various Unixen today.  This script was
139          primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use
140          piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.
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142       ptar
143          ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.
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145       ptardiff
146          ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an
147          extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility
148          requires the "Text::Diff" module to function properly; this module
149          isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)
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151       ptargrep
152          ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
153          files in a tar archive.
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155       shasum
156          This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module, is used to
157          print or verify SHA checksums.
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159       zipdetails
160          zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure
161          of the zip file.  It is not concerned with displaying any details of
162          the compressed data stored in the zip file.
163
164   Installation
165       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the
166       perl distribution.
167
168       cpan
169          cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows you to
170          install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information
171          about them, and a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode
172          of the CPAN module,
173
174              perl -MCPAN -e shell
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176       instmodsh
177          A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed
178          modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an
179          installed module.
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SEE ALSO

182       perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker,
183       splain, perldiag, "roffitall|roffitall", File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug,
184       h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist,
185       ptar, ptardiff, shasum, zipdetails
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189perl v5.30.2                      2020-03-27                       PERLUTIL(1)
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