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

NAME
       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
NOTE
       Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS.  You can use either the
       maintenance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in
       AmigaOS.  See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing
       this problem.
SYNOPSIS
       One can read this document in the following formats:
               man perlamiga
               multiview perlamiga.guide
       to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be
       read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.
       A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets
       section of the Aminet:
             http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg
DESCRIPTION
   Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS
       Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
             You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important
             part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest
             versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
             <http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/>; ):
                     ixemul-bin
                     ixemul-env-bin
                     pdksh-bin
             Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add
             other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).
       Version of Amiga OS
             You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is
             version 3.1.
   Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
       Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
       way as on any other platform, by
               perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3
       If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
       opposed to your program), use
               perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
       Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
       command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the
       s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX
       with
               foo arg1 arg2 arg3
       (Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not
       necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it
       easier to use your script under *nix.)
   Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS
       Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
       deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:
       o     fork()
       o     some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and
             file dates
       o     inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
       o     umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the
             file is finally close()d
INSTALLATION
       Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract
       the binary distribution:
       lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha
       or
       tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz
       (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
       For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.
Accessing documentation
   Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS
       If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl
       manpages, use something like this:
               man perlfunc
               man less
               man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
       to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
               man perl
       Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in
       the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl
       library will not be found.
       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
       packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
       above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.
   Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS
       If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs.  Cd to
       directory with .pod files, and do like this
               cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
               pod2html
       After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
       directory, and go ahead with reading docs.
       Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".
   Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS
       Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
       mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or,
       alternately, prebuilt info pages.
   Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS
       Can be constructed using "pod2latex".
BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS
       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
   Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS
       You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
       Aminet.
   Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS
       You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and
       extract it with:
         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz
       or get the official source from CPAN:
         http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0
       Extract it like this
         tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz
       You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
       normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
       configure, but it causes no harm.)
   Making Perl on AmigaOS
       Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)
         sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg
       Now type
         make depend
       Now!
         make
   Testing Perl on AmigaOS
       Now run
         make test
       Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:
       io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t,
       lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t
   Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS
       Run
         make install
PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS
       As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
       After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
       pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
       its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
       that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).  The
       build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL
       ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not
       quite work.  Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate
       nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.  Fixing the
       breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and
       how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().
AUTHORS
       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel AT imsdd.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
       trg AT privat.se
SEE ALSO
       perl(1).

perl v5.16.3                      2013-03-04                      PERLAMIGA(1)