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.