Perl Kit, Version 5.0 Copyright (c) 1989,1990,1991,1992,1993,1994 Larry Wall All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either: a) the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option) any later version, or b) the "Artistic License" which comes with this Kit. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See either the GNU General Public License or the Artistic License for more details. You should have received a copy of the Artistic License with this Kit, in the file named "Artistic". If not, I'll be glad to provide one. You should also have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. For those of you that choose to use the GNU General Public License, my interpretation of the GNU General Public License is that no Perl script falls under the terms of the GPL unless you explicitly put said script under the terms of the GPL yourself. Furthermore, any object code linked with perl does not automatically fall under the terms of the GPL, provided such object code only adds definitions of subroutines and variables, and does not otherwise impair the resulting interpreter from executing any standard Perl script. I consider linking in C subroutines in this manner to be the moral equivalent of defining subroutines in the Perl language itself. You may sell such an object file as proprietary provided that you provide or offer to provide the Perl source, as specified by the GNU General Public License. (This is merely an alternate way of specifying input to the program.) You may also sell a binary produced by the dumping of a running Perl script that belongs to you, provided that you provide or offer to provide the Perl source as specified by the GPL. (The fact that a Perl interpreter and your code are in the same binary file is, in this case, a form of mere aggregation.) This is my interpretation of the GPL. If you still have concerns or difficulties understanding my intent, feel free to contact me. Of course, the Artistic License spells all this out for your protection, so you may prefer to use that. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Perl is a language that combines some of the features of C, sed, awk and shell. See the manual page for more hype. There are also two Nutshell Handbooks published by O'Reilly & Assoc. See pod/perlbook.pod for more information. Please read all the directions below before you proceed any further, and then follow them carefully. After you have unpacked your kit, you should have all the files listed in MANIFEST. Installation 1) Run Configure. This will figure out various things about your system. Some things Configure will figure out for itself, other things it will ask you about. If the test scripts and programs run ok, the defaults will usually be right. It will then proceed to make config.h, config.sh, and Makefile. You may have to explicitly say sh Configure to ensure that Configure is run under sh. If you're a hotshot, run Configure -d to take all the defaults and edit config.sh to patch up any flaws. If you later make any changes to config.sh, you should propagate them to all the .SH files by running Configure -S. Configure supports a number of useful options. Run Configure -h to get a listing. To compile with gcc, for example, you can run Configure -Dcc=gcc, or answer 'gcc' at the cc prompt. If you wish to use gcc (or another alternative compiler) you should use Configure -Dcc=gcc. That way, the the hints files can set appropriate defaults. By default, perl will be installed in /usr/local/{bin, lib, man}. You can specify a different 'prefix' for the default installation directory, when Configure prompts you or by using the Configure command line option -Dprefix='/some/directory'. By default, perl will use dynamic extensions if your system supports it. If you want to force perl to be compiled statically, you can either choose this when Configure prompts you or by using the Configure command line option -Uusedl If you change compilers or make other significant changes, you should probably _not_ re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or rename it, e.g. mv config.sh config.sh.old. Then rerun Configure with the options you want to use. You can also supply a file config.over to over-ride Configure's guesses. It will get loaded up at the very end, just before config.sh is created. You might possibly have to trim # comments from the front of Configure if your sh doesn't handle them, but all other # comments will be taken care of. (If you don't have sh, you'll have to copy the sample file config_H to config.h and edit the config.h to reflect your system's peculiarities.) 2) Glance through config.h to make sure system dependencies are correct. Most of them should have been taken care of by running the Configure script. If you have any additional changes to make to the C definitions, they can be done in cflags.SH. For instance, to turn off the optimizer on toke.c, find the line in the switch structure for toke.c and put the command optimize='-g' before the ;;. To change the C flags for all the files, edit config.sh and change either $ccflags or $optimize, and then re-run Configure -S ; make depend. 3) make depend This will look for all the includes and modify Makefile accordingly. Configure will offer to do this for you. 4) make This will attempt to make perl in the current directory. If you can't compile successfully, try adding a -DCRIPPLED_CC flag. (Just because you get no errors doesn't mean it compiled right!) This simplifies some complicated expressions for compilers that get indigestion easily. If that has no effect, try turning off optimization. If you have missing routines, you probably need to add some library or other, or you need to undefine some feature that Configure thought was there but is defective or incomplete. Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files without some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or allocate larger internal tables. You can customize the switches for each file in cflags.SH. It's okay to insert rules for specific files into Makefile.SH, since a default rule only takes effect in the absence of a specific rule. If you used a hint file, try reading the comments in the hint file for further tips and information. If you can successfully build miniperl, but the process crashes during the building of extensions, you should run make minitest to test your version of miniperl. Some additional things that have been reported for either perl4 or perl5: Genix may need to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS. NCR Tower 32 (OS 2.01.01) may need -W2,-Sl,2000 and #undef MKDIR. UTS may need one or more of -DCRIPPLED_CC, -K or -g, and undef LSTAT. If you get syntax errors on '(', try -DCRIPPLED_CC. Machines with half-implemented dbm routines will need to #undef I_ODBM SCO prior to 3.2.4 may be missing dbmclose(). An upgrade to 3.2.4 that includes libdbm.nfs (which includes dbmclose()) may be available. If you get duplicates upon linking for malloc et al, say -DHIDEMYMALLOC. If you get duplicate function definitions (a perl function has the same name as another function on your system) try -DEMBED. If you get varags problems with gcc, be sure that gcc is installed correctly. When using gcc, you should probably have i_stdarg='define' and i_varags='undef' in config.sh. The problem is usually solved by running fixincludes correctly. If you wish to use dynamic loading on SunOS or Solaris, and you have GNU as and GNU ld installed, you may need to add -B/bin/ to your $ccflags and $ldflags so that the system's versions of as and ld are used. If you run into dynamic loading problems, check your setting of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Perl should build fine with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset, though that may depend on details of your local set-up. 5) make test This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made. If it doesn't say "All tests successful" then something went wrong. See the README in the t subdirectory. Note that you can't run it in background if this disables opening of /dev/tty. If "make test" bombs out, just cd to the t directory and run TEST by hand to see if it makes any difference. If individual tests bomb, you can run them by hand, e.g., ./perl op/groups.t 6) make install This will put perl into a public directory (such as /usr/local/bin). It will also try to put the man pages in a reasonable place. It will not nroff the man page, however. You may need to be root to run make install. If you are not root, you must own the directories in question and you should ignore any messages about chown not working. make install will install the following: perl, perl5.nnn where nnn is the current release number. This will be a link to perl. suidperl, sperl5.nnn If you requested setuid emulation. a2p awk-to-perl translator cppstdin This is used by perl -P, if your cc -E can't read from stdin. c2ph, pstruct Scripts for handling C structures in header files. s2p sed-to-perl translator find2perl find-to-perl translator h2xs Converts C .h header files to Perl extensions. perldoc Tool to read perl's pod documentation. pod2html, Converters from perl's pod documentation format pod2latex, and to other useful formats. pod2man library files in $privlib and $archlib specified to Configure, usually under /usr/local/lib/perl5/. man pages in the location specified to Configure, usually something like /usr/local/man/man1. module in the location specified to Configure, usually man pages under /usr/local/lib/perl5/man/man3. pod/*.pod in $privlib/pod/. Perl's *.h header files and the libperl.a library are also installed under $archlib so that you may later build new extensions even if the Perl source is no longer available. make install may also offer to install perl in a "standard" location. Most of the documentation in the pod/ directory is also available in HTML and LaTeX format. Type cd pod; make html; cd .. to generate the html versions, and cd pod; make tex; cd .. to generate the LaTeX versions. 7) Read the manual entries before running perl. 8) IMPORTANT! Help save the world! Communicate any problems and suggested patches to me, lwall@netlabs.com (Larry Wall), so we can keep the world in sync. If you have a problem, there's someone else out there who either has had or will have the same problem. If possible, send in patches such that the patch program will apply them. Context diffs are the best, then normal diffs. Don't send ed scripts-- I've probably changed my copy since the version you have. It's also helpful if you send the output of "uname -a". Watch for perl patches in comp.lang.perl. Patches will generally be in a form usable by the patch program. If you are just now bringing up perl and aren't sure how many patches there are, write to me and I'll send any you don't have. Your current patch level is shown in patchlevel.h. Just a personal note: I want you to know that I create nice things like this because it pleases the Author of my story. If this bothers you, then your notion of Authorship needs some revision. But you can use perl anyway. :-) The author.