perlamiga(1)

1PERLAMIGA(1)           Perl Programmers Reference Guide           PERLAMIGA(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
7

NOTE

9       Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS.  You can use either the
10       maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in
11       AmigaOS.  See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing
12       this problem.
13

SYNOPSIS

15       One can read this document in the following formats:
16
17               man perlamiga
18               multiview perlamiga.guide
19
20       to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be
21       read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.
22
23       A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets
24       section of the Aminet:
25
26             http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg
27

DESCRIPTION

29   Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS
30       Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
31             You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important
32             part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest
33             versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
34             <http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/> ):
35
36                     ixemul-bin
37                     ixemul-env-bin
38                     pdksh-bin
39
40             Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add
41             other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).
42
43       Version of Amiga OS
44             You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is
45             version 3.1.
46
47   Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
48       Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
49       way as on any other platform, by
50
51               perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
52
53       If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
54       opposed to your program), use
55
56               perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
57
58       Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
59       command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the
60       s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX
61       with
62
63               foo arg1 arg2 arg3
64
65       (Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not
66       necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it
67       easier to use your script under *nix.)
68
69   Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS
70       Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
71       deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:
72
73       ·     fork()
74
75       ·     some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and
76             file dates
77
78       ·     inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
79
80       ·     umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the
81             file is finally close()d
82

INSTALLATION

84       Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract
85       the binary distribution:
86
87       lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha
88
89       or
90
91       tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz
92
93       (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
94
95       For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.
96

Accessing documentation

98   Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS
99       If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl
100       manpages, use something like this:
101
102               man perlfunc
103               man less
104               man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
105
106       to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
107
108               man perl
109
110       Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in
111       the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl
112       library will not be found.
113
114       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
115       packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
116       above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.
117
118   Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS
119       If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs.  Cd to
120       directory with .pod files, and do like this
121
122               cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
123               pod2html
124
125       After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
126       directory, and go ahead with reading docs.
127
128       Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".
129
130   Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS
131       Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
132       mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or,
133       alternately, prebuilt info pages.
134
135   Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS
136       Can be constructed using "pod2latex".
137

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS

139       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
140
141   Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS
142       You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
143       Aminet.
144
145   Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS
146       You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and
147       extract it with:
148
149         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz
150
151       or get the official source from CPAN:
152
153         http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
154
155       Extract it like this
156
157         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz
158
159       You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
160       normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
161       configure, but it causes no harm.)
162
163   Making Perl on AmigaOS
164       Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)
165
166         sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg
167
168       Now type
169
170         make depend
171
172       Now!
173
174         make
175
176   Testing Perl on AmigaOS
177       Now run
178
179         make test
180
181       Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:
182
183       io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t,
184       lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t
185
186   Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS
187       Run
188
189         make install
190

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS

192       As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
193       After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
194       pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
195       its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
196       that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).  The
197       build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL
198       ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not
199       quite work.  Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate
200       nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.  Fixing the
201       breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and
202       how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().
203

AUTHORS

205       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
206       trg@privat.utfors.se
207