perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
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/per
lamiga.pod.
DESCRIPTION
Prerequisites
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 following archives from
ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current or a mirror:
ixemul-46.0-bin.lha ixemul-46.0-env-bin.lha
pdksh-4.9-bin.lha ADE-misc-bin.lha
Note that there might be newer versions available by
the time you read this.
Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might
want to add other packages of ADE (the Amiga Devel
opers Environment).
Version of Amiga OS
You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Rec
ommended 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 to your program), use
perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3
Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the sys
tem's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syn
tax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you
can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with
(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-5.003-bin.lha
or
tar xvzpf perl-5.003-bin.tgz
(Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)
For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropri
ate docs.
Accessing documentation
Manpages
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
Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for docu
mentation for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need
to give the section - `3' above - to avoid shadowing by
the less(1) manpage.
HTML
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'.
GNU `info' files
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.
`LaTeX' docs
can be constructed using `pod2latex'.
BUILD
Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
Prerequisites
You need to have the latest ADE (Amiga Developers Environ
ment) from ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current. Also,
you need a lot of free memory, probably at least 8MB.
Getting the perl source
You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from
Ninemoons and extract it with:
tar xvzpf perl-5.004-src.tgz
or get the official source from CPAN:
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0
Extract it like this
You will see a message about errors while extracting Con
figure. This is normal and expected. (There is a conflict
with a similarly-named file configure, but it causes no
harm.)
Making
sh configure.gnu --prefix=/ade
Now
make
Testing
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
Run
make install
AUTHOR
Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de
SEE ALSO
perl(1).
Man(1) output converted with
man2html