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.

       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 explana-
          tion) 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 utili-
          ties 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 utili-
          ties have "USAGE" sections, Perl modules usually have "SYNOPSIS"
          sections: "podselect -s "SYNOPSIS" ..." will extract this section
          for a given file.

       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 doc-
          umentation 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 con-
       version 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
          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;
              }

       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":

              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

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

       Development

       There are a set of utilities which help you in developing Perl pro-
       grams, and in particular, extending Perl with C.

       perlbug
          perlbug is the recommended way to report bugs in the perl inter-
          preter itself or any of the standard library modules back to the
          developers; please read through the documentation for perlbug thor-
          oughly before using it to submit a bug report.

       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 cor-
          responding .h file. See the h2ph documentation for more on how to
          convert a whole bunch of header files at once.

       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 dec-
          larations 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.

       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.

       perlcc
          perlcc is the interface to the experimental Perl compiler suite.

       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, perlcc

perl v5.8.8                       2006-06-14                       PERLUTIL(1)