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
          As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD.

       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.

       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.

   Converters
       To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, 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.

       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.

       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.

       prove
          prove is a command-line interface  to  the  test-running  functionality  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.

       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 v5.8.0, 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.)

       ptargrep
          ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of files in a tar archive.

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

       zipdetails
          zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure  of  the  zip  file.   It  is  not
          concerned with displaying any details of the compressed data stored in the zip file.

   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

       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|roffitall",  File::Find,  pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, instmodsh, piconv,
       prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum, zipdetails

perl v5.26.1                                       2023-05-23                                        PERLUTIL(1)