perlutil(1)
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.
c2ph and pstruct
c2ph and pstruct, which are actually the same program but behave
differently depending on how they are called, provide another way of
getting at C with Perl - they'll convert C structures and union
declarations to Perl code. This is deprecated in favour of h2xs
these days.
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, c2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist, ptar, ptardiff, shasum, zipdetails
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