PERLFAQ2(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLFAQ2(1)NAMEperlfaq2 - Obtaining and Learning about Perl
DESCRIPTION
This section of the FAQ answers questions about where to
find source and documentation for Perl, support, and related
matters.
What machines support perl? Where do I get it?
The standard release of perl (the one maintained by the perl
development team) is distributed only in source code form.
You can find this at http://www.cpan.org/src/latest.tar.gz ,
which is in a standard Internet format (a gzipped archive in
POSIX tar format).
Perl builds and runs on a bewildering number of platforms.
Virtually all known and current Unix derivatives are sup-
ported (perl's native platform), as are other systems like
VMS, DOS, OS/2, Windows, QNX, BeOS, OS X, MPE/iX and the
Amiga.
Binary distributions for some proprietary platforms, includ-
ing Apple systems, can be found http://www.cpan.org/ports/
directory. Because these are not part of the standard dis-
tribution, they may and in fact do differ from the base perl
port in a variety of ways. You'll have to check their
respective release notes to see just what the differences
are. These differences can be either positive (e.g. exten-
sions for the features of the particular platform that are
not supported in the source release of perl) or negative
(e.g. might be based upon a less current source release of
perl).
How can I get a binary version of perl?
If you don't have a C compiler because your vendor for what-
ever reasons did not include one with your system, the best
thing to do is grab a binary version of gcc from the net and
use that to compile perl with. CPAN only has binaries for
systems that are terribly hard to get free compilers for,
not for Unix systems.
Some URLs that might help you are:
http://www.cpan.org/ports/
http://www.perl.com/pub/language/info/software.html
Someone looking for a perl for Win16 might look to Laszlo
Molnar's djgpp port in http://www.cpan.org/ports/#msdos ,
which comes with clear installation instructions. A simple
installation guide for MS-DOS using Ilya Zakharevich's OS/2
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port is available at
http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perl5dos.html and similarly for
Windows 3.1 at http://www.cs.ruu.nl/%7Epiet/perlwin3.html .
I don't have a C compiler. How can I build my own Perl
interpreter?
Since you don't have a C compiler, you're doomed and your
vendor should be sacrificed to the Sun gods. But that
doesn't help you.
What you need to do is get a binary version of gcc for your
system first. Consult the Usenet FAQs for your operating
system for information on where to get such a binary ver-
sion.
I copied the perl binary from one machine to another, but
scripts don't work.
That's probably because you forgot libraries, or library
paths differ. You really should build the whole distribution
on the machine it will eventually live on, and then type
"make install". Most other approaches are doomed to
failure.
One simple way to check that things are in the right place
is to print out the hard-coded @INC that perl looks through
for libraries:
% perl -le 'print for @INC'
If this command lists any paths that don't exist on your
system, then you may need to move the appropriate libraries
to these locations, or create symbolic links, aliases, or
shortcuts appropriately. @INC is also printed as part of
the output of
% perl -V
You might also want to check out "How do I keep my own
module/library directory?" in perlfaq8.
I grabbed the sources and tried to compile but gdbm/dynamic
loading/malloc/linking/... failed. How do I make it work?
Read the INSTALL file, which is part of the source distribu-
tion. It describes in detail how to cope with most idiosyn-
crasies that the Configure script can't work around for any
given system or architecture.
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What modules and extensions are available for Perl? What is
CPAN? What does CPAN/src/... mean?
CPAN stands for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, a ~1.2Gb
archive replicated on nearly 200 machines all over the
world. CPAN contains source code, non-native ports, docu-
mentation, scripts, and many third-party modules and exten-
sions, designed for everything from commercial database
interfaces to keyboard/screen control to web walking and CGI
scripts. The master web site for CPAN is
http://www.cpan.org/ and there is the CPAN Multiplexer at
http://www.cpan.org/CPAN.html which will choose a mirror
near you via DNS. See http://www.perl.com/CPAN (without a
slash at the end) for how this process works. Also,
http://mirror.cpan.org/ has a nice interface to the
http://www.cpan.org/MIRRORED.BY mirror directory.
See the CPAN FAQ at http://www.cpan.org/misc/cpan-faq.html
for answers to the most frequently asked questions about
CPAN including how to become a mirror.
CPAN/path/... is a naming convention for files available on
CPAN sites. CPAN indicates the base directory of a CPAN
mirror, and the rest of the path is the path from that
directory to the file. For instance, if you're using
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN as your CPAN
site, the file CPAN/misc/japh is downloadable as
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/misc/japh .
Considering that there are close to two thousand existing
modules in the archive, one probably exists to do nearly
anything you can think of. Current categories under
CPAN/modules/by-category/ include Perl core modules;
development support; operating system interfaces; network-
ing, devices, and interprocess communication; data type
utilities; database interfaces; user interfaces; interfaces
to other languages; filenames, file systems, and file lock-
ing; internationalization and locale; world wide web sup-
port; server and daemon utilities; archiving and compres-
sion; image manipulation; mail and news; control flow utili-
ties; filehandle and I/O; Microsoft Windows modules; and
miscellaneous modules.
See http://www.cpan.org/modules/00modlist.long.html or
http://search.cpan.org/ for a more complete list of modules
by category.
CPAN is not affiliated with O'Reilly Media.
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Is there an ISO or ANSI certified version of Perl?
Certainly not. Larry expects that he'll be certified before
Perl is.
Where can I get information on Perl?
The complete Perl documentation is available with the Perl
distribution. If you have Perl installed locally, you prob-
ably have the documentation installed as well: type "man
perl" if you're on a system resembling Unix. This will lead
you to other important man pages, including how to set your
$MANPATH. If you're not on a Unix system, access to the
documentation will be different; for example, documentation
might only be in HTML format. All proper perl installations
have fully-accessible documentation.
You might also try "perldoc perl" in case your system
doesn't have a proper man command, or it's been misin-
stalled. If that doesn't work, try looking in
/usr/local/lib/perl5/pod for documentation.
If all else fails, consult http://perldoc.perl.org/ which
has the complete documentation in HTML and PDF format.
Many good books have been written about Perl--see the sec-
tion below for more details.
Tutorial documents are included in current or upcoming Perl
releases include perltoot for objects or perlboot for a
beginner's approach to objects, perlopentut for file opening
semantics, perlreftut for managing references, perlretut for
regular expressions, perlthrtut for threads, perldebtut for
debugging, and perlxstut for linking C and Perl together.
There may be more by the time you read this. These URLs
might also be useful:
http://perldoc.perl.org/
http://bookmarks.cpan.org/search.cgi?cat=Training%2FTutorials
What are the Perl newsgroups on Usenet? Where do I post
questions?
Several groups devoted to the Perl language are on Usenet:
comp.lang.perl.announce Moderated announcement group
comp.lang.perl.misc High traffic general Perl discussion
comp.lang.perl.moderated Moderated discussion group
comp.lang.perl.modules Use and development of Perl modules
comp.lang.perl.tk Using Tk (and X) from Perl
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comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi Writing CGI scripts for the Web.
Some years ago, comp.lang.perl was divided into those
groups, and comp.lang.perl itself officially removed. While
that group may still be found on some news servers, it is
unwise to use it, because postings there will not appear on
news servers which honour the official list of group names.
Use comp.lang.perl.misc for topics which do not have a
more-appropriate specific group.
There is also a Usenet gateway to Perl mailing lists spon-
sored by perl.org at nntp://nntp.perl.org , a web interface
to the same lists at http://nntp.perl.org/group/ and these
lists are also available under the "perl.*" hierarchy at
http://groups.google.com . Other groups are listed at
http://lists.perl.org/ ( also known as
http://lists.cpan.org/ ).
A nice place to ask questions is the PerlMonks site,
http://www.perlmonks.org/ , or the Perl Beginners mailing
list http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=beginners .
Note that none of the above are supposed to write your code
for you: asking questions about particular problems or gen-
eral advice is fine, but asking someone to write your code
for free is not very cool.
Where should I post source code?
You should post source code to whichever group is most
appropriate, but feel free to cross-post to
comp.lang.perl.misc. If you want to cross-post to
alt.sources, please make sure it follows their posting stan-
dards, including setting the Followup-To header line to NOT
include alt.sources; see their FAQ (
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/alt-sources-intro/ ) for details.
If you're just looking for software, first use Google (
http://www.google.com ), Google's usenet search interface (
http://groups.google.com ), and CPAN Search (
http://search.cpan.org ). This is faster and more productive
than just posting a request.
Perl Books
A number of books on Perl and/or CGI programming are avail-
able. A few of these are good, some are OK, but many aren't
worth your money. There is a list of these books, some with
extensive reviews, at http://books.perl.org/ . If you don't
see your book listed here, you can write to
perlfaq-workers@perl.org .
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The incontestably definitive reference book on Perl, written
by the creator of Perl, is Programming Perl:
Programming Perl (the "Camel Book"):
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
(English, translations to several languages are also available)
The companion volume to the Camel containing thousands of
real-world examples, mini-tutorials, and complete programs
is:
The Perl Cookbook (the "Ram Book"):
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington,
with Foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 0-596-00313-7 [2nd Edition August 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlckbk2/
If you're already a seasoned programmer, then the Camel Book
might suffice for you to learn Perl. If you're not, check
out the Llama book:
Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
ISBN 0-596-10105-8 [4th edition July 2005]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/
And for more advanced information on writing larger pro-
grams, presented in the same style as the Llama book, con-
tinue your education with the Alpaca book:
Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules (the "Alpaca Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
If you're not an accidental programmer, but a more serious
and possibly even degreed computer scientist who doesn't
need as much hand-holding as we try to provide in the Llama,
please check out the delightful book
Perl: The Programmer's Companion
by Nigel Chapman
ISBN 0-471-97563-X [1997, 3rd printing Spring 1998]
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/catalog/97563-X.htm
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/chapman/perl/perltpc.html (errata etc)
If you are more at home in Windows the following is avail-
able (though unfortunately rather dated).
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Learning Perl on Win32 Systems (the "Gecko Book")
by Randal L. Schwartz, Erik Olson, and Tom Christiansen,
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-324-3 [1st edition August 1997]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lperlwin/
Addison-Wesley ( http://www.awlonline.com/ ) and Manning (
http://www.manning.com/ ) are also publishers of some fine
Perl books such as Object Oriented Programming with Perl by
Damian Conway and Network Programming with Perl by Lincoln
Stein.
An excellent technical book discounter is Bookpool at
http://www.bookpool.com/ where a 30% discount or more is not
unusual.
What follows is a list of the books that the FAQ authors
found personally useful. Your mileage may (but, we hope,
probably won't) vary.
Recommended books on (or mostly on) Perl follow.
References
Programming Perl
by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant
ISBN 0-596-00027-8 [3rd edition July 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pperl3/
Perl 5 Pocket Reference
by Johan Vromans
ISBN 0-596-00032-4 [3rd edition May 2000]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlpr3/
Tutorials
Beginning Perl
by James Lee
ISBN 1-59059-391-X [2nd edition August 2004]
http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=344
Elements of Programming with Perl
by Andrew L. Johnson
ISBN 1-884777-80-5 [1st edition October 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Johnson/
Learning Perl
by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and brian d foy
ISBN 0-596-10105-8 [4th edition July 2005]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/learnperl4/
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Learning Perl Objects, References, and Modules
by Randal L. Schwartz, with Tom Phoenix (foreword by Damian Conway)
ISBN 0-596-00478-8 [1st edition June 2003]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/lrnperlorm/
Task-Oriented
Writing Perl Modules for CPAN
by Sam Tregar
ISBN 1-59059-018-X [1st edition Aug 2002]
http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=14
The Perl Cookbook
by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington
with foreword by Larry Wall
ISBN 1-56592-243-3 [1st edition August 1998]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cookbook/
Effective Perl Programming
by Joseph Hall
ISBN 0-201-41975-0 [1st edition 1998]
http://www.awl.com/
Real World SQL Server Administration with Perl
by Linchi Shea
ISBN 1-59059-097-X [1st edition July 2003]
http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=171
Special Topics
Perl Best Practices
by Damian Conway
ISBN: 0-596-00173-8 [1st edition July 2005]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlbp/
Higher Order Perl
by Mark-Jason Dominus
ISBN: 1558607013 [1st edition March 2005]
http://hop.perl.plover.com/
Perl 6 Now: The Core Ideas Illustrated with Perl 5
by Scott Walters
ISBN 1-59059-395-2 [1st edition December 2004]
http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=355
Mastering Regular Expressions
by Jeffrey E. F. Friedl
ISBN 0-596-00289-0 [2nd edition July 2002]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex2/
Network Programming with Perl
by Lincoln Stein
ISBN 0-201-61571-1 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.awlonline.com/
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Object Oriented Perl
Damian Conway
with foreword by Randal L. Schwartz
ISBN 1-884777-79-1 [1st edition August 1999]
http://www.manning.com/Conway/
Data Munging with Perl
Dave Cross
ISBN 1-930110-00-6 [1st edition 2001]
http://www.manning.com/cross
Mastering Perl/Tk
by Steve Lidie and Nancy Walsh
ISBN 1-56592-716-8 [1st edition January 2002]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mastperltk/
Extending and Embedding Perl
by Tim Jenness and Simon Cozens
ISBN 1-930110-82-0 [1st edition August 2002]
http://www.manning.com/jenness
Perl Debugger Pocket Reference
by Richard Foley
ISBN 0-596-00503-2 [1st edition January 2004]
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perldebugpr/
Which magazines have Perl content?
The first (and for a long time, only) periodical devoted to
All Things Perl, The Perl Journal contains tutorials,
demonstrations, case studies, announcements, contests, and
much more. TPJ has columns on web development, databases,
Win32 Perl, graphical programming, regular expressions, and
networking, and sponsors the Obfuscated Perl Contest and the
Perl Poetry Contests. Beginning in November 2002, TPJ moved
to a reader-supported monthly e-zine format in which sub-
scribers can download issues as PDF documents. For more
details on TPJ, see http://www.tpj.com/
Beyond this, magazines that frequently carry quality arti-
cles on Perl are The Perl Review (
http://www.theperlreview.com ), Unix Review (
http://www.unixreview.com/ ), Linux Magazine (
http://www.linuxmagazine.com/ ), and Usenix's
newsletter/magazine to its members, login: (
http://www.usenix.org/ )
The Perl columns of Randal L. Schwartz are available on the
web at http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/WebTechniques/ ,
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/ , and
http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/LinuxMag/ .
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What mailing lists are there for Perl?
Most of the major modules (Tk, CGI, libwww-perl) have their
own mailing lists. Consult the documentation that came with
the module for subscription information.
A comprehensive list of Perl related mailing lists can be
found at:
http://lists.perl.org/
Where are the archives for comp.lang.perl.misc?
The Google search engine now carries archived and searchable
newsgroup content.
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.perl.misc
If you have a question, you can be sure someone has already
asked the same question at some point on c.l.p.m. It
requires some time and patience to sift through all the con-
tent but often you will find the answer you seek.
Where can I buy a commercial version of perl?
In a real sense, perl already is commercial software: it has
a license that you can grab and carefully read to your
manager. It is distributed in releases and comes in well-
defined packages. There is a very large user community and
an extensive literature. The comp.lang.perl.* newsgroups
and several of the mailing lists provide free answers to
your questions in near real-time. Perl has traditionally
been supported by Larry, scores of software designers and
developers, and myriad programmers, all working for free to
create a useful thing to make life better for everyone.
However, these answers may not suffice for managers who
require a purchase order from a company whom they can sue
should anything go awry. Or maybe they need very serious
hand-holding and contractual obligations. Shrink-wrapped CDs
with perl on them are available from several sources if that
will help. For example, many Perl books include a distribu-
tion of perl, as do the O'Reilly Perl Resource Kits (in both
the Unix flavor and in the proprietary Microsoft flavor);
the free Unix distributions also all come with perl.
Where do I send bug reports?
If you are reporting a bug in the perl interpreter or the
modules shipped with Perl, use the perlbug program in the
Perl distribution or mail your report to perlbug@perl.org or
at http://rt.perl.org/perlbug/ .
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For Perl modules, you can submit bug reports to the Request
Tracker set up at http://rt.cpan.org .
If you are posting a bug with a non-standard port (see the
answer to "What platforms is perl available for?"), a binary
distribution, or a non-standard module (such as Tk, CGI,
etc), then please see the documentation that came with it to
determine the correct place to post bugs.
Read the perlbug(1) man page (perl5.004 or later) for more
information.
What is perl.com? Perl Mongers? pm.org? perl.org? cpan.org?
Perl.com at http://www.perl.com/ is part of the O'Reilly
Network, a subsidiary of O'Reilly Media.
The Perl Foundation is an advocacy organization for the Perl
language which maintains the web site http://www.perl.org/
as a general advocacy site for the Perl language. It uses
the domain to provide general support services to the Perl
community, including the hosting of mailing lists, web
sites, and other services. The web site
http://www.perl.org/ is a general advocacy site for the Perl
language, and there are many other sub-domains for special
topics, such as
http://learn.perl.org/
http://use.perl.org/
http://jobs.perl.org/
http://lists.perl.org/
Perl Mongers uses the pm.org domain for services related to
Perl user groups, including the hosting of mailing lists and
web sites. See the Perl user group web site at
http://www.pm.org/ for more information about joining,
starting, or requesting services for a Perl user group.
http://www.cpan.org/ is the Comprehensive Perl Archive Net-
work, a replicated worldwide repository of Perl software,
see the What is CPAN? question earlier in this document.
AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2006 Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington,
and other authors as noted. All rights reserved.
This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here are
in the public domain. You are permitted and encouraged to
use this code and any derivatives thereof in your own
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programs for fun or for profit as you see fit. A simple
comment in the code giving credit to the FAQ would be
courteous but is not required.
perl v5.8.8 2006-06-30 12
