NAME

       perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

NOTE

       Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS.  You can use either the maintenance release Perl
       5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in AmigaOS.  See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN
       AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing this problem.

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/dev/gg

DESCRIPTION

   Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS
       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 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 for Perl on AmigaOS
       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.

   Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS
       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".

   Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS
       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.

   Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS
       Can be constructed using "pod2latex".

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS

       Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

   Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS
       You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet.

   Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS
       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.cpan.org/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 Perl on AmigaOS
       Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)

         sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg

       Now type

         make depend

       Now!

         make

   Testing Perl on AmigaOS
       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 on AmigaOS
       Run

         make install

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS

       As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.  After Perl 5.7.2
       (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the
       individual changes) Perl dropped its internal support for vfork(), and that was very
       probably the step that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork).  The build
       finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL ends up as "0" in the
       produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not quite work.  Also, executing miniperl in
       backticks seems to generate nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems.
       Fixing the breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and how one
       is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().

AUTHORS

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

SEE ALSO

       perl(1).