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