


PERLUTIL(1)      Perl Programmers Reference Guide     PERLUTIL(1)


NAME
       perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution

DESCRIPTION
       Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl
       distribution installs a range of utilities on your system.
       There are also several utilities which are used by the
       Perl distribution 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.

LIST OF UTILITIES
   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
          favourite 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.





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       podchecker
          If you're writing your own documentation in POD, the
          podchecker 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
          produce a Perl program based around this code:

              while (<>) {
                  ($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, 9999);
                  print $Fld2;
              }

       s2p and psed
          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;
              }

          When invoked as psed, it behaves as a sed
          implementation, written in Perl.

       find2perl
          Finally, find2perl translates "find" commands to Perl
          equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an
          example, "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
       config_data
          Query or change configuration of Perl modules that use
          Module::Build-based configuration files for features
          and config data.

       libnetcfg
          To display and change the libnet configuration run the
          libnetcfg command.

       perlivp
          The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build
          time to test the Perl version it was built under.  It
          can be used after running "make install" (or your
          platform's equivalent procedure) to verify that perl
          and its libraries have been installed correctly.

   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
          documentation for perlbug thoroughly before using it to
          submit a bug report.

       perlthanks
          This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you
          message back to the authors and maintainers of perl.
          It's just perlbug installed under another name.

       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 convert a whole bunch of header files at
          once.



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       c2ph and pstruct
          c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program
          but behave differently depending on how they are
          called, provide another way of getting at C with Perl -
          they'll convert 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.

       enc2xs
          enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from
          either Unicode Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl
          Encoding Files (.enc).  Besides being used internally
          during the build process of the Encode module, you can
          use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
          knowledge of XS is necessary.

       xsubpp
          xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C
          code.  It is typically run by the makefiles created by
          ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

          xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding
          the constructs necessary to let C functions manipulate
          Perl values and creates the glue necessary to let Perl
          access those functions.

       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.

       prove
          prove is a command-line interface to the test-running
          functionality of of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative
          to "make test".

       corelist
          A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to
          query what modules were shipped with given versions of
          perl.

   General tools
       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly
       because they came along modules included in the perl
       distribution.




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       piconv
          piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding
          converter widely available for various Unixen today.
          This script was primarily a technology demonstrator for
          Perl 5.8.0, but you can use piconv in the place of
          iconv for virtually any case.

       ptar
          ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.

       ptardiff
          ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff
          between an extracted archive and an unextracted one.
          (Note that this utility requires the "Text::Diff"
          module to function properly; this module isn't
          distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)

       shasum
          This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module,
          is used to print or verify SHA checksums.

   Installation
       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't
       come with the perl distribution.

       cpan
          cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows
          you to install modules or distributions from CPAN, or
          just get information about them, and a lot more.  It is
          similar to the command line mode of the CPAN module,

              perl -MCPAN -e shell

       cpanp
          cpanp is, like cpan, a command-line interface to the
          CPAN, using the "CPANPLUS" module as a back-end. It can
          be used interactively or imperatively.

       cpan2dist
          cpan2dist is a tool to create distributions (or
          packages) from CPAN modules, then suitable for your
          package manager of choice. Support for specific formats
          are available from CPAN as "CPANPLUS::Dist::*" modules.

       instmodsh
          A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine
          installed modules, validate your packlists and even
          create a tarball from an installed module.

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, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, cpanp,



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       cpan2dist, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar,
       ptardiff, shasum























































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