


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


NAME
       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

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/per-
       lamiga.pod.

DESCRIPTION
       Prerequisites


       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 following archives from
             ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current or a mirror:

             ixemul-46.0-bin.lha ixemul-46.0-env-bin.lha
             pdksh-4.9-bin.lha ADE-misc-bin.lha

             Note that there might be newer versions available by
             the time you read this.

             Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might
             want to add other packages of ADE (the Amiga Devel-
             opers Environment).

       Version of Amiga OS
             You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Rec-
             ommended 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 to your program), use

               perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

       Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the sys-
       tem's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syn-
       tax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you
       can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with




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


               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:

       fork()

       some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count
       and file dates

       inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file

       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-5.003-bin.lha

       or

       tar xvzpf perl-5.003-bin.tgz

       (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)

       For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropri-
       ate docs.

Accessing documentation
       Manpages

       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



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


       man pages for the perl library will not be found.

       Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for docu-
       mentation for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need
       to give the section - `3' above - to avoid shadowing by
       the less(1) manpage.

       HTML

       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'.

       GNU `info' files

       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.

       `LaTeX' docs

       can be constructed using `pod2latex'.

BUILD
       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

       Prerequisites

       You need to have the latest ADE (Amiga Developers Environ-
       ment) from ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current.  Also,
       you need a lot of free memory, probably at least 8MB.

       Getting the perl source

       You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from
       Ninemoons and extract it with:

         tar xvzpf perl-5.004-src.tgz

       or get the official source from CPAN:

         http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0

       Extract it like this




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


         tar xvzpf perl5.004.tar.gz

       You will see a message about errors while extracting Con-
       figure. This is normal and expected. (There is a conflict
       with a similarly-named file configure, but it causes no
       harm.)

       Making

         sh configure.gnu --prefix=/ade

       Now

         make


       Testing

       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

       Run

         make install


AUTHOR
       Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de

SEE ALSO
       perl(1).

















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