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 DOCUMENTATION
17 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 explana‐
30 tion) into a manpage, and then run man to display it; if man isn't
31 available, pod2text will be used instead and the output piped
32 through your favourite pager.
33 pod2html and pod2latex
35 As well as these two, there are two other converters: pod2html will
36 produce HTML pages from POD, and pod2latex, which produces LaTeX
37 files.
38 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 utili‐
42 ties will automatically call pod2usage on themselves when you call
43 them with "-help".
44 podselect
46 pod2usage is a special case of podselect, a utility to extract named
47 sections from documents written in POD. For instance, while utili‐
48 ties have "USAGE" sections, Perl modules usually have "SYNOPSIS"
49 sections: "podselect -s "SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this section
50 for a given file.
51 podchecker
53 If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the podchecker
54 utility will look for errors in your markup.
55 splain
57 splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error message to
58 it, and it'll explain it for you.
59 roffitall
61 The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your system but lives in
62 the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit; it converts all the doc‐
63 umentation from the distribution to *roff format, and produces a
64 typeset PostScript or text file of the whole lot.
65 CONVERTORS
67 To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included three con‐
69 version filters:
70 a2p
72 a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs; for example, "a2p -F:" on
73 the simple awk script "{print $2}" will produce a Perl program based
74 around this code:
75 while (<>) {
77 ($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
78 print $Fld2;
79 }
80 s2p
82 Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl programs. s2p run on
83 "s/foo/bar" will produce a Perl program based around this:
84 while (<>) {
86 chomp;
87 s/foo/bar/g;
88 print if $printit;
89 }
90 find2perl
92 Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl equivalents
93 which use the File::Find module. As an example, "find2perl . -user
94 root -perm 4000 -print" produces the following callback subroutine
95 for "File::Find":
96 sub wanted {
98 my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
99 (($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
100 $uid == $uid{'root'}) &&
101 (($mode & 0777) == 04000);
102 print("$name\n");
103 }
104 As well as these filters for converting other languages, the pl2pm
106 utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style
107 Perl5 modules.
108 Administration
110 libnetcfg
112 To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
113 command.
114 Development
116 There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl pro‐
118 grams, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
119 perlbug
121 perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the perl inter‐
122 preter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the
123 developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug thor‐
124 oughly before using it to submit a bug report.
125 h2ph
127 Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C libraries,
128 programmers used to get library constants by reading through the C
129 header files. You may still see "require 'syscall.ph'" or similar
130 around - the .ph file should be created by running h2ph on the cor‐
131 responding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to
132 convert a whole bunch of header files at once.
133 c2ph and pstruct
135 c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program but behave
136 differently depending on how they are called, provide another way of
137 getting at C with Perl - they'll convert C structures and union dec‐
138 larations to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs these
139 days.
140 h2xs
142 h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will try and write
143 as much glue between C libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's
144 also very useful for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.
145 dprofpp
147 Perl comes with a profiler, the Devel::DProf module. The dprofpp
148 utility analyzes the output of this profiler and tells you which
149 subroutines are taking up the most run time. See Devel::DProf for
150 more information.
151 perlcc
153 perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler suite.
154 SEE ALSO
156 perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker,
158 splain, perldiag, roffitall, a2p, s2p, find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm,
159 perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs, dprofpp, Devel::DProf, perlcc
160perl v5.8.8 2006-01-07 PERLUTIL(1)