PERLUTIL(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLUTIL(1)
perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl distribu-
tion installs a range of utilities on your system. There are
also several utilities which are used by the Perl distribu-
tion itself as part of the install process. This document
exists to list all of these utilities, explain what they are
for and provide pointers to each module's documentation, if
appropriate.
DOCUMENTATION
perldoc
The main interface to Perl's documentation is "perldoc",
although if you're reading this, it's more than likely
that you've already found it. perldoc will extract and
format the documentation from any file in the current
directory, any Perl module installed on the system, or
any of the standard documentation pages, such as this
one. Use "perldoc <name>" to get information on any of
the utilities described in this document.
pod2man and pod2text
If it's run from a terminal, perldoc will usually call
pod2man to translate POD (Plain Old Documentation - see
perlpod for an explanation) into a manpage, and then run
man to display it; if man isn't available, pod2text will
be used instead and the output piped through your favour-
ite pager.
pod2html and pod2latex
As well as these two, there are two other converters:
pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD, and pod2latex,
which produces LaTeX files.
pod2usage
If you just want to know how to use the utilities
described here, pod2usage will just extract the "USAGE"
section; some of the utilities will automatically call
pod2usage on themselves when you call them with "-help".
podselect
pod2usage is a special case of podselect, a utility to
extract named sections from documents written in POD. For
instance, while utilities have "USAGE" sections, Perl
modules usually have "SYNOPSIS" sections: "podselect -s
"SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this section for a given
file.
podchecker
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If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the pod-
checker utility will look for errors in your markup.
splain
splain is an interface to perldiag - paste in your error
message to it, and it'll explain it for you.
roffitall
The "roffitall" utility is not installed on your system
but lives in the pod/ directory of your Perl source kit;
it converts all the documentation from the distribution
to *roff format, and produces a typeset PostScript or
text file of the whole lot.
CONVERTORS
To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included
three conversion filters:
a2p
a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs; for example,
"a2p -F:" on the simple awk script "{print $2}" will pro-
duce a Perl program based around this code:
while (<>) {
($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
print $Fld2;
}
s2p
Similarly, s2p converts sed scripts to Perl programs. s2p
run on "s/foo/bar" will produce a Perl program based
around this:
while (<>) {
chomp;
s/foo/bar/g;
print if $printit;
}
find2perl
Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl
equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an exam-
ple, "find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print" produces
the following callback subroutine for "File::Find":
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sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_)) &&
$uid == $uid{'root'}) &&
(($mode & 0777) == 04000);
print("$name\n");
}
As well as these filters for converting other languages, the
pl2pm utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4
libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.
Administration
libnetcfg
To display and change the libnet configuration run the
libnetcfg command.
Development
There are a set of utilities which help you in developing
Perl programs, and in particular, extending Perl with C.
perlbug
perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the perl
interpreter itself or any of the standard library modules
back to the developers; please read through the documen-
tation for perlbug thoroughly before using it to submit a
bug report.
h2ph
Back before Perl had the XS system for connecting with C
libraries, programmers used to get library constants by
reading through the C header files. You may still see
"require 'syscall.ph'" or similar around - the .ph file
should be created by running h2ph on the corresponding .h
file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to con-
vert a whole bunch of header files at once.
c2ph and pstruct
c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program but
behave differently depending on how they are called, pro-
vide another way of getting at C with Perl - they'll con-
vert C structures and union declarations to Perl code.
This is deprecated in favour of h2xs these days.
h2xs
h2xs converts C header files into XS modules, and will
try and write as much glue between C libraries and Perl
modules as it can. It's also very useful for creating
skeletons of pure Perl modules.
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dprofpp
Perl comes with a profiler, the Devel::DProf module. The
dprofpp utility analyzes the output of this profiler and
tells you which subroutines are taking up the most run
time. See Devel::DProf for more information.
perlcc
perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler
suite.
SEE ALSO
perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect,
podchecker, splain, perldiag, roffitall, a2p, s2p,
find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs,
dprofpp, Devel::DProf, perlcc
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