perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

- NAME
- SYNOPSIS
- DESCRIPTION

- Prerequisites
- Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS
- Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS

- INSTALLATION
- Accessing documentation

- Manpages
- HTML
- GNU `info` files
- `LaTeX` docs

- BUILD

- Prerequisites
- Getting the perl source
- Making
- Testing
- Installing the built perl

- AUTHORS
- SEE ALSO

# 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/perlamiga.pod.

A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets section of the Aminet:

          http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dirs/dev_gg.html

# 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 latest versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/):

              ixemul-bin
              ixemul-env-bin
              pdksh-bin

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

Version of Amiga OS
  You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended 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 system's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with

            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-$VERSION-bin.lha

or

tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz

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

For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate 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 man pages for the perl library will not be found.

Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation 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 ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet.

## Getting the perl source

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

      tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz

or get the official source from CPAN:

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

Extract it like this

      tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz

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

## Making

- remember to use a healthy sized stack (I used 2000000)

- your PATH environment variable must include /bin (e.g. ``.:/bin'' is good) (or, more precisely, it must include the directory where you have your basic UNIX utilities like test, cat, sed, and so on)

-       sh Configure -Dprefix=/ade -Dloclibpth=/ade/lib

- fix makedepend

              In the file 'makedepend' there are three spots like this `$cat ...`:
              a for loop near line 75, an egrep near line 161, and a for loop near
              line 175.  In all those spots using an editor change the $cat to
              /bin/cat.

- now type make depend

              When the make depend has ended load the gnumakefile into
              an editor and go to the end of the file.

              Move upwards in the file until you reach av.o: EXTERN.h
              and delete all lines down to # WARNING: Put....

- now go to the x2p directory

              Load the gnumakefile into an editor.

              Go to the end moveup until you reach hash.o: EXTERN.h
              and delete all lines dowonwards until you reach a line saying

              # WARNING: Put nothing....

- 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

# AUTHORS

Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se

# SEE ALSO

perl(1).

perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS