perlutil(1)

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

NAME

6       perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
7

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.
15

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.
26
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.
33
34       pod2html
35          As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will
36          produce HTML pages from POD.
37
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".
43
44       podchecker
45          If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker
46          utility will look for errors in your markup.
47
48       splain
49          splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to
50          it, and it'll explain it for you.
51
52       "roffitall"
53          The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your system but lives in
54          the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the
55          documentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a
56          typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
57
58   Converters
59       To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm
60       utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style
61       Perl5 modules.
62
63   Administration
64       libnetcfg
65          To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
66          command.
67
68       perlivp
69          The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test
70          the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running
71          "make install" (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify
72          that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.
73
74   Development
75       There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl
76       programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
77
78       perlbug
79          perlbug used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl
80          interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to
81          the developers; bug reports and patches should now be submitted to
82          <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>.
83
84       perlthanks
85          This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back
86          to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed
87          under another name.
88
89       h2ph
90          Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
91          programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
92          header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar
93          around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the
94          corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to
95          convert a whole bunch of header files at once.
96
97       h2xs
98          h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
99          as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's
100          also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
101
102       enc2xs
103          enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode
104          Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
105          Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode
106          module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
107          knowledge of XS is necessary.
108
109       xsubpp
110          xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.  It is
111          typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
112
113          xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
114          necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the
115          glue necessary to let Perl access those functions.
116
117       prove
118          prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality
119          of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative to "make test".
120
121       corelist
122          A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to query what
123          modules were shipped with given versions of perl.
124
125   General tools
126       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
127       came along modules included in the perl distribution.
128
129       piconv
130          piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding converter
131          widely available for various Unixen today.  This script was
132          primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use
133          piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.
134
135       ptar
136          ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.
137
138       ptardiff
139          ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an
140          extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility
141          requires the "Text::Diff" module to function properly; this module
142          isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)
143
144       ptargrep
145          ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
146          files in a tar archive.
147
148       shasum
149          This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module, is used to
150          print or verify SHA checksums.
151
152       zipdetails
153          zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure
154          of the zip file.  It is not concerned with displaying any details of
155          the compressed data stored in the zip file.
156
157   Installation
158       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the
159       perl distribution.
160
161       cpan
162          cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows you to
163          install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information
164          about them, and a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode
165          of the CPAN module,
166
167              perl -MCPAN -e shell
168
169       instmodsh
170          A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed
171          modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an
172          installed module.
173

NAME

DESCRIPTION

LIST OF UTILITIES

SEE ALSO