1PERLUTIL(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLUTIL(1)
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6 perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
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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.
15
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.
26 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.
33 pod2html
35 As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will
36 produce HTML pages from POD.
37 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".
43 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.
50 podchecker
52 If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker
53 utility will look for errors in your markup.
54 splain
56 splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to
57 it, and it'll explain it for you.
58 "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.
64 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.
69 Administration
71 libnetcfg
72 To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
73 command.
74 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.
80 Development
82 There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl
83 programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
84 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>.
90 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.
95 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.
103 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.
108 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.
115 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.
119 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.
123 prove
125 prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality
126 of Test::Harness. It's an alternative to "make test".
127 corelist
129 A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to query what
130 modules were shipped with given versions of perl.
131 General tools
133 A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
134 came along modules included in the perl distribution.
135 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.
141 ptar
143 ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.
144 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.)
150 ptargrep
152 ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
153 files in a tar archive.
154 shasum
156 This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module, is used to
157 print or verify SHA checksums.
158 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 Installation
165 These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the
166 perl distribution.
167 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 perl -MCPAN -e shell
175 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.
180
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
186perl v5.30.2 2020-03-27 PERLUTIL(1)