=head1 NAME

perl - Practical Extraction and Report Language

=head1 SYNOPSIS

B<perl> S<[ B<-sTuU> ]> S<[ B<-hv> ] [ B<-V>[:I<configvar>] ]>

S<[ B<-cw> ] [ B<-d>[:I<debugger>] ] [ B<-D>[I<number/list>] ]>

S<[ B<-pna> ] [ B<-F>I<pattern> ] [ B<-l>[I<octal>] ] [ B<-0>[I<octal>] ]>

S<[ B<-I>I<dir> ] [ B<-m>[B<->]I<module> ] [ B<-M>[B<->]I<'module...'> ]>

S<[ B<-P> ]> S<[ B<-S> ]> S<[ B<-x>[I<dir>] ]>

S<[ B<-i>[I<extension>] ]> S<[ B<-e> I<'command'> ]

[ B<--> ] [ I<programfile> ] [ I<argument> ]...>

If you're new to Perl, you should start with L<perlintro>, which is a

general intro for beginners and provides some background to help you

navigate the rest of Perl's extensive documentation.

For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into several sections.

=head2 Overview

perl Perl overview (this section)

perlintro Perl introduction for beginners

perltoc Perl documentation table of contents

=head2 Tutorials

perlreftut Perl references short introduction

perldsc Perl data structures intro

perllol Perl data structures: arrays of arrays

perlrequick Perl regular expressions quick start

perlretut Perl regular expressions tutorial

perlboot Perl OO tutorial for beginners

perltoot Perl OO tutorial, part 1

perltooc Perl OO tutorial, part 2

perlbot Perl OO tricks and examples

perlstyle Perl style guide

perlcheat Perl cheat sheet

perltrap Perl traps for the unwary

perldebtut Perl debugging tutorial

perlfaq Perl frequently asked questions

perlfaq1 General Questions About Perl

perlfaq2 Obtaining and Learning about Perl

perlfaq3 Programming Tools

perlfaq4 Data Manipulation

perlfaq5 Files and Formats

perlfaq6 Regexes

perlfaq7 Perl Language Issues

perlfaq8 System Interaction

perlfaq9 Networking

=head2 Reference Manual

perlsyn Perl syntax

perldata Perl data structures

perlop Perl operators and precedence

perlsub Perl subroutines

perlfunc Perl built-in functions

perlopentut Perl open() tutorial

perlpacktut Perl pack() and unpack() tutorial

perlpod Perl plain old documentation

perlpodspec Perl plain old documentation format specification

perlrun Perl execution and options

perldiag Perl diagnostic messages

perllexwarn Perl warnings and their control

perldebug Perl debugging

perlvar Perl predefined variables

perlre Perl regular expressions, the rest of the story

perlreref Perl regular expressions quick reference

perlref Perl references, the rest of the story

perlform Perl formats

perlobj Perl objects

perltie Perl objects hidden behind simple variables

perldbmfilter Perl DBM filters

perlipc Perl interprocess communication

perlfork Perl fork() information

perlnumber Perl number semantics

perlthrtut Perl threads tutorial

perlothrtut Old Perl threads tutorial

perlport Perl portability guide

perllocale Perl locale support

perluniintro Perl Unicode introduction

perlunicode Perl Unicode support

perlebcdic Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms

perlsec Perl security

perlmod Perl modules: how they work

perlmodlib Perl modules: how to write and use

perlmodstyle Perl modules: how to write modules with style

perlmodinstall Perl modules: how to install from CPAN

perlnewmod Perl modules: preparing a new module for distribution

perlutil utilities packaged with the Perl distribution

perlcompile Perl compiler suite intro

perlfilter Perl source filters

=head2 Internals and C Language Interface

perlembed Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application

perldebguts Perl debugging guts and tips

perlxstut Perl XS tutorial

perlxs Perl XS application programming interface

perlclib Internal replacements for standard C library functions

perlguts Perl internal functions for those doing extensions

perlcall Perl calling conventions from C

perlapi Perl API listing (autogenerated)

perlintern Perl internal functions (autogenerated)

perliol C API for Perl's implementation of IO in Layers

perlapio Perl internal IO abstraction interface

perlhack Perl hackers guide

=head2 Miscellaneous

perlbook Perl book information

perltodo Perl things to do

perldoc Look up Perl documentation in Pod format

perlhist Perl history records

perldelta Perl changes since previous version

perl583delta Perl changes in version 5.8.3

perl582delta Perl changes in version 5.8.2

perl581delta Perl changes in version 5.8.1

perl58delta Perl changes in version 5.8.0

perl573delta Perl changes in version 5.7.3

perl572delta Perl changes in version 5.7.2

perl571delta Perl changes in version 5.7.1

perl570delta Perl changes in version 5.7.0

perl561delta Perl changes in version 5.6.1

perl56delta Perl changes in version 5.6

perl5005delta Perl changes in version 5.005

perl5004delta Perl changes in version 5.004

perlartistic Perl Artistic License

perlgpl GNU General Public License

=head2 Language-Specific

perlcn Perl for Simplified Chinese (in EUC-CN)

perljp Perl for Japanese (in EUC-JP)

perlko Perl for Korean (in EUC-KR)

perltw Perl for Traditional Chinese (in Big5)

=head2 Platform-Specific

perlsolaris Perl notes for Solaris

The manpages listed above are installed in the F</usr/perl5/man/> directory.

Extensive additional documentation for Perl modules is available. This

additional documentation is in the F</usr/perl5/man> directory.

Some of this additional documentation is distributed standard with Perl,

but you'll also find documentation for any customer-installed third-party

modules there.

You can view Perl's documentation with man(1) by including /usr/perl5/man

in the MANPATH environment variable. Notice that running catman(1M) on the

Perl manual pages is not supported. For other Solaris-specific details,

see the NOTES section below.

You can also use the supplied F</usr/perl5/bin/perldoc> script to view

Perl information.

If something strange has gone wrong with your program and you're not

sure where you should look for help, try the B<-w> switch first. It

will often point out exactly where the trouble is.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary

text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing

reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many

system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical

(easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny,

elegant, minimal).

Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best

features of C, B<sed>, B<awk>, and B<sh>, so people familiar with

those languages should have little difficulty with it. (Language

historians will also note some vestiges of B<csh>, Pascal, and even

BASIC-PLUS.) Expression syntax corresponds closely to C

expression syntax. Unlike most Unix utilities, Perl does not

arbitrarily limit the size of your data--if you've got the memory,

Perl can slurp in your whole file as a single string. Recursion is of

unlimited depth. And the tables used by hashes (sometimes called

"associative arrays") grow as necessary to prevent degraded

performance. Perl can use sophisticated pattern matching techniques to

scan large amounts of data quickly. Although optimized for

scanning text, Perl can also deal with binary data, and can make dbm

files look like hashes. Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C programs

through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents many stupid

security holes.

If you have a problem that would ordinarily use B<sed> or B<awk> or

B<sh>, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a little faster,

and you don't want to write the silly thing in C, then Perl may be for

you. There are also translators to turn your B<sed> and B<awk>

scripts into Perl scripts.

But wait, there's more...

Begun in 1993 (see L<perlhist>), Perl version 5 is nearly a complete

rewrite that provides the following additional benefits:

=over 4

=item *

modularity and reusability using innumerable modules

Described in L<perlmod>, L<perlmodlib>, and L<perlmodinstall>.

=item *

embeddable and extensible

Described in L<perlembed>, L<perlxstut>, L<perlxs>, L<perlcall>,

L<perlguts>, and L<xsubpp>.

=item *

roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple simultaneous DBM

implementations)

Described in L<perltie> and L<AnyDBM_File>.

=item *

subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and prototyped

Described in L<perlsub>.

=item *

arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous functions

Described in L<perlreftut>, L<perlref>, L<perldsc>, and L<perllol>.

=item *

object-oriented programming

Described in L<perlobj>, L<perlboot>, L<perltoot>, L<perltooc>,

and L<perlbot>.

=item *

support for light-weight processes (threads)

Described in L<perlthrtut> and L<threads>.

=item *

support for Unicode, internationalization, and localization

Described in L<perluniintro>, L<perllocale> and L<Locale::Maketext>.

=item *

lexical scoping

Described in L<perlsub>.

=item *

regular expression enhancements

Described in L<perlre>, with additional examples in L<perlop>.

=item *

enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment,

with integrated editor support

Described in L<perldebtut>, L<perldebug> and L<perldebguts>.

=item *

POSIX 1003.1 compliant library

Described in L<POSIX>.

=back

Okay, that's I<definitely> enough hype.

=head1 AVAILABILITY

Perl is available for most operating systems, including virtually

all Unix-like platforms. See L<perlport/"Supported Platforms">

for a listing.

=head1 ENVIRONMENT

The Perl shipped with Solaris is installed under F</usr/perl5> rather

than the default F</usr/local> location. This is so that it can coexist

with a customer-installed Perl in the default F</usr/local> location.

Any additional modules that you choose to install will be placed in the

F</usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4> directory. The F</usr/perl5/vendor_perl>

directory is reserved for SMI-provided modules.

Notice that the Perl utility scripts such as perldoc and perlbug are in

the F</usr/perl5/bin> directory, so if you wish to use them you need to

include F</usr/perl5/bin> in your PATH environment variable.

See also the L<perlrun> mapage.

=head1 AUTHOR

Larry Wall <larry@wall.org>, with the help of oodles of other folks.

If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of help to others

who wish to advocate the use of Perl in their applications,

or if you wish to simply express your gratitude to Larry and the

Perl developers, please write to perl-thanks@perl.org .

=head1 FILES

"@INC" locations of perl libraries

=head1 ATTRIBUTES

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

____________________________________________________________

| ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| Availability | SUNWperl583core |

| | SUNWperl583usr |

| | SUNWperl583man |

| | SUNWpl5u SUNWpl5v SUNWpl5p |

| | SUNWpl5m |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| Interface Stability | |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| o Script interface | Evolving |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| o XSUB interface | Evolving |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| o Binary interface | Unstable |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

| o Directory layout | Evolving |

|_____________________________|_____________________________|

=head1 SEE ALSO

perlsolaris(1) Perl version 5 on Solaris systems

perlgcc(1) Compile perl modules using gcc

a2p awk to perl translator

s2p sed to perl translator

http://www.perl.com/ the Perl Home Page

http://www.cpan.org/ the Comprehensive Perl Archive

http://www.perl.org/ Perl Mongers (Perl user groups)

=head1 DIAGNOSTICS

The C<use warnings> pragma (and the B<-w> switch) produces some

lovely diagnostics.

See L<perldiag> for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics. The C<use

diagnostics> pragma automatically turns Perl's normally terse warnings

and errors into these longer forms.

Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the error, with an

indication of the next token or token type that was to be examined.

(In a script passed to Perl via B<-e> switches, each

B<-e> is counted as one line.)

Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can produce error

messages such as "Insecure dependency". See L<perlsec>.

Did we mention that you should definitely consider using the B<-w>

switch?

=head1 NOTES

Perl 5.8.4 has been built to be largefile-aware and to use 64-bit integers,

although the interpreter itself is a 32-bit application (LP32). To view

detailed configuration information, use perl -V and perlbug -dv.

If you wish to build and install add-on modules from CPAN using gcc, you can do

so using the /usr/perl5/5.8.4/bin/perlgcc script - see C<perlgcc(1)> for

details.

If you wish to build and install your own version of Perl, you should NOT

remove the 5.8.4 version of perl under /usr/perl5, as it is required by

several system utilities. The Perl package names are as follows:

SUNWperl583core Perl 5.8.4 (Core files)

SUNWperl583usr Perl 5.8.4 (Non-core files)

SUNWperl583man Perl 5.8.4 (Manual pages)

Solaris 10 also ships with the 5.6.1 version of Perl that was included in

Solaris 9. If you are upgrading your system and wish to continue

to use Perl 5.6.1 as the default Perl version you should refer to the

L<perlsolaris> manpage for details of how to do this. Note that you should

upgrade your installation to use Perl 5.8.4 as soon as is practicable, as

Perl 5.6.1 may be removed in a future release.

The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it." Divining

how many more is left as an exercise to the reader.

The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,

Impatience, and Hubris. See the Camel Book for why.

=head1 BUGS

The B<-w> switch is not mandatory.

Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of various

operations such as type casting, atof(), and floating-point

output with sprintf().

If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and writes on a

particular stream, so does Perl. (This doesn't apply to sysread()

and syswrite().)

While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary size limits

(apart from memory size), there are still a few arbitrary limits: a

given variable name may not be longer than 251 characters. Line numbers

displayed by diagnostics are internally stored as short integers,

so they are limited to a maximum of 65535 (higher numbers usually being

affected by wraparound).

You may mail your bug reports (be sure to include full configuration

information as output by the myconfig program in the perl source

tree, or by C<perl -V>) to perlbug@perl.org . If you've succeeded

in compiling perl, the B<perlbug> script in the F<utils/> subdirectory

can be used to help mail in a bug report.

Perl actually stands for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, but

don't tell anyone I said that.