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
28       pod2text
29          If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call pod2man to
30          translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see perlpod for an
31          explanation) into a manpage, and then run man to display it; if man
32          isn't available, pod2text will be used instead and the output piped
33          through your favourite pager.
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35       pod2html
36          As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will
37          produce HTML pages from POD.
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39       pod2usage
40          If you just want to know how to use the utilities described here,
41          pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE" section; some of the
42          utilities will automatically call pod2usage on themselves when you
43          call them with "-help".
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45       podchecker
46          If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker
47          utility will look for errors in your markup.
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49       splain
50          splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to
51          it, and it'll explain it for you.
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53       roffitall
54          The roffitall utility is not installed on your system but lives in
55          the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the
56          documentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a
57          typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
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59   Converters
60       pl2pm
61          To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm
62          utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-
63          style Perl5 modules.
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65   Administration
66       libnetcfg
67          To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
68          command.
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70       perlivp
71          The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test
72          the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running
73          "make install" (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify
74          that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.
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76   Development
77       There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl
78       programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
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80       perlbug
81          perlbug used to be the recommended way to report bugs in the perl
82          interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules back to
83          the developers; bug reports and patches should now be submitted to
84          <https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues>.
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86       perlthanks
87          This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back
88          to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed
89          under another name.
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91       h2ph
92          Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
93          programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
94          header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar
95          around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the
96          corresponding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to
97          convert a whole bunch of header files at once.
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99       h2xs
100          h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
101          as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's
102          also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
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104       enc2xs
105          enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode
106          Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
107          Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode
108          module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
109          knowledge of XS is necessary.
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111       xsubpp
112          xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.  It is
113          typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
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115          xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
116          necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the
117          glue necessary to let Perl access those functions.
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119       prove
120          prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality
121          of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative to "make test".
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123       corelist
124          A command-line front-end to Module::CoreList, to query what modules
125          were shipped with given versions of perl.
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127   General tools
128       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
129       came along modules included in the perl distribution.
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131       encguess
132          encguess will attempt to guess the character encoding of files.
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134       json_pp
135          json_pp is a pure Perl JSON converter and formatter.
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137       piconv
138          piconv is a Perl version of iconv(1), a character encoding converter
139          widely available for various Unixen today.  This script was
140          primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use
141          piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.
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143       ptar
144          ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.
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146       ptardiff
147          ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an
148          extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility
149          requires the Text::Diff module to function properly; this module
150          isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)
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152       ptargrep
153          ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
154          files in a tar archive.
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156       shasum
157          This utility, that comes with the Digest::SHA module, is used to
158          print or verify SHA checksums.
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160       streamzip
161          streamzip compresses data streamed to STDIN into a streamed zip
162          container.
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164       zipdetails
165          zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure
166          of the zip file.  It is not concerned with displaying any details of
167          the compressed data stored in the zip file.
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169   Installation
170       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the
171       perl distribution.
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173       cpan
174          cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows you to
175          install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information
176          about them, and a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode
177          of the CPAN module,
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179              perl -MCPAN -e shell
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181       instmodsh
182          A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed
183          modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an
184          installed module.
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SEE ALSO

187       perldoc, pod2man, pod2text, pod2html, pod2usage, podchecker, splain,
188       pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, encguess, instmodsh,
189       json_pp, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum, streamzip,
190       zipdetails
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194perl v5.34.1                      2022-03-15                       PERLUTIL(1)
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