perlamiga(1)

1PERLAMIGA(1)           Perl Programmers Reference Guide           PERLAMIGA(1)
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3
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NAME

6       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
7

NOTE

9       Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS.  You can use either the mainte‐
10       nance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in Ami‐
11       gaOS.  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/index.html
27

DESCRIPTION

29       Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS
30
31       Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
32             You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important
33             part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest ver‐
34             sions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
35             http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):
36
37                     ixemul-bin
38                     ixemul-env-bin
39                     pdksh-bin
40
41             Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add
42             other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).
43
44       Version of Amiga OS
45             You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is
46             version 3.1.
47
48       Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
49
50       Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
51       way as on any other platform, by
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53               perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
54
55       If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
56       opposed to your program), use
57
58               perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
59
60       Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
61       command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the
62       s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX
63       with
64
65               foo arg1 arg2 arg3
66
67       (Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not neces‐
68       sary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it easier
69       to use your script under *nix.)
70
71       Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS
72
73       Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
74       deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:
75
76       ·     fork()
77
78       ·     some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and
79             file dates
80
81       ·     inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
82
83       ·     umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the
84             file is finally close()d
85

INSTALLATION

87       Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract
88       the binary distribution:
89
90       lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha
91
92       or
93
94       tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz
95
96       (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
97
98       For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.
99

Accessing documentation

101       Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS
102
103       If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl man‐
104       pages, use something like this:
105
106               man perlfunc
107               man less
108               man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
109
110       to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
111
112               man perl
113
114       Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in
115       the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl
116       library will not be found.
117
118       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
119       packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
120       above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.
121
122       Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS
123
124       If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs.  Cd to
125       directory with .pod files, and do like this
126
127               cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
128               pod2html
129
130       After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
131       directory, and go ahead with reading docs.
132
133       Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".
134
135       Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS
136
137       Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
138       mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alter‐
139       nately, prebuilt info pages.
140
141       Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS
142
143       Can be constructed using "pod2latex".
144

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS

146       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
147
148       Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS
149
150       You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
151       Aminet.
152
153       Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS
154
155       You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and
156       extract it with:
157
158         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz
159
160       or get the official source from CPAN:
161
162         http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
163
164       Extract it like this
165
166         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz
167
168       You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
169       normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
170       configure, but it causes no harm.)
171
172       Making Perl on AmigaOS
173
174       Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)
175
176         sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg
177
178       Now type
179
180         make depend
181
182       Now!
183
184         make
185
186       Testing Perl on AmigaOS
187
188       Now run
189
190         make test
191
192       Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:
193
194       io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t,
195       lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t
196
197       Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS
198
199       Run
200
201         make install
202

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS

204       As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
205       After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
206       pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
207       its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
208       that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).  The
209       build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL
210       ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not
211       quite work.  Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate
212       nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.  Fixing the
213       breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and
214       how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().
215

AUTHORS

217       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
218       trg@privat.utfors.se
219