NAME

       perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl

DESCRIPTION

       These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9 Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a
       replacement for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both copious and excellent). If you have
       any questions to which you can't find answers in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at
       lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer them.

   Invoking Perl
       Perl is invoked from the command line as described in perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first
       line such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a shebang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS
       shell where to find the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this statement should be "#!/bin/perl" if you
       wish to be able to directly invoke the script by its name.
            Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce
       Acme-friendly error messages of the form "filename:18".

       Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are self-configuring and are able to correctly
       create their own shebang path from config information located in Plan 9 Perl. These you won't need to be
       worried about.

   What's in Plan 9 Perl
       Although Plan 9 Perl currently only  provides static loading, it is built with a number of useful
       extensions.  These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect to see others (and DynaLoading!)
       in the future.

   What's not in Plan 9 Perl
       As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-
       priority items.

   Perl5 Functions not currently supported in Plan 9 Perl
       Some, such as "chown" and "umask" aren't provided because the concept does not exist within Plan 9.
       Others, such as some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written yet. Many in the latter
       category may be supported in the future.

       The functions not currently implemented include:

           chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
           setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
           getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
           sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
           endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

       There may be several other functions that have undefined behavior so this list shouldn't be considered
       complete.

   Signals in Plan 9 Perl
       For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal
       emulation provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal stacking isn't supported. The signals
       provided are:

           SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
           SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
           SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
           SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

COMPILING AND INSTALLING PERL ON PLAN 9

       WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul!

          This is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. Still to be
       implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. Many perl commands are
       missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. These gaps will,
       with perseverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near
       future.To install this software:

       1. Create the source directories and libraries for perl by running the plan9/setup.rc command (i.e.,
       located in the plan9 subdirectory).  Note: the setup routine assumes that you haven't dearchived these
       files into /sys/src/cmd/perl. After running setup.rc you may delete the copy of the source you originally
       detarred, as source code has now been installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. If you plan on installing perl
       binaries for all architectures, run "setup.rc -a".

       2. After making sure that you have adequate privileges to build system software, from
       /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

               mk install

       If you wish to install perl versions for all architectures (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run:

               mk installall

       3. Wait. The build process will take a *long* time because perl bootstraps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB
       RAM machine takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from scratch.

   Installing Perl Documentation on Plan 9
       This perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of documentation. To add these to the built-in
       manuals that come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

               mk man

       To begin your reading, start with:

               man perl

       This is a good introduction and will direct you towards other man pages that may interest you.

       (Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear not.)

BUGS

       "As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world . . ." - Carl Sagan

Revision date

       This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.

AUTHOR

       Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct comments toward:

       Luther Huffman, lutherh@stratcom.com, Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc.