1 If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you see.
2 It is written in the POD format (see pod/perlpod.pod) which is specially
3 designed to be readable as is.
7 INSTALL - Build and Installation guide for perl 5.
11 First, make sure you have an up-to-date version of Perl. If you
12 didn't get your Perl source from CPAN, check the latest version at
13 http://www.cpan.org/src/. Perl uses a version scheme where even-numbered
14 subreleases (like 5.8.x and 5.10.x) are stable maintenance releases and
15 odd-numbered subreleases (like 5.7.x and 5.9.x) are unstable
16 development releases. Development releases should not be used in
17 production environments. Fixes and new features are first carefully
18 tested in development releases and only if they prove themselves to be
19 worthy will they be migrated to the maintenance releases.
21 The basic steps to build and install perl 5 on a Unix system with all
22 the defaults are to run, from a freshly unpacked source tree:
29 Each of these is explained in further detail below.
31 The above commands will install Perl to /usr/local (or some other
32 platform-specific directory -- see the appropriate file in hints/.)
33 If that's not okay with you, you can run Configure interactively, by
34 just typing "sh Configure" (without the -de args). You can also specify
35 any prefix location by adding "-Dprefix='/some/dir'" to Configure's args.
36 To explicitly name the perl binary, use the command
37 "make install PERLNAME=myperl".
39 Building perl from source requires an ANSI compliant C compiler.
40 A minimum of C89 is required. Some features available in C99 will
41 be probed for and used when found. The perl build process does not
42 rely on anything more than C89.
44 These options, and many more, are explained in further detail below.
46 If you're building perl from a git repository, you should also consult
47 the documentation in pod/perlgit.pod for information on that special
50 If you have problems, corrections, or questions, please see
51 L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
53 For information on what's new in this release, see the
54 pod/perldelta.pod file. For more information about how to find more
55 specific detail about changes, see the Changes file.
59 This document is written in pod format as an easy way to indicate its
60 structure. The pod format is described in pod/perlpod.pod, but you can
61 read it as is with any pager or editor. Headings and items are marked
62 by lines beginning with '='. The other mark-up used is
64 B<text> embolden text, used for switches, programs or commands
66 L<name> A link (cross reference) to name
69 Although most of the defaults are probably fine for most users,
70 you should probably at least skim through this document before
73 In addition to this file, check if there is a README file specific to
74 your operating system, since it may provide additional or different
75 instructions for building Perl. If there is a hint file for your
76 system (in the hints/ directory) you might also want to read it
77 for even more information.
79 For additional information about porting Perl, see the section on
80 L<"Porting information"> below, and look at the files in the Porting/
85 =head2 Changes and Incompatibilities
87 Please see pod/perldelta.pod for a description of the changes and
88 potential incompatibilities introduced with this release. A few of
89 the most important issues are listed below, but you should refer
90 to pod/perldelta.pod for more detailed information.
92 B<WARNING:> This version is not binary compatible with prior releases of Perl.
93 If you have built extensions (i.e. modules that include C code)
94 using an earlier version of Perl, you will need to rebuild and reinstall
97 Pure perl modules without XS or C code should continue to work fine
98 without reinstallation. See the discussion below on
99 L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> for more details.
101 The standard extensions supplied with Perl will be handled automatically.
103 On a related issue, old modules may possibly be affected by the changes
104 in the Perl language in the current release. Please see
105 pod/perldelta.pod for a description of what's changed. See your
106 installed copy of the perllocal.pod file for a (possibly incomplete)
107 list of locally installed modules. Also see the L<CPAN> module's
108 C<autobundle> function for one way to make a "bundle" of your currently
113 Configure will figure out various things about your system. Some
114 things Configure will figure out for itself, other things it will ask
115 you about. To accept the default, just press RETURN. The default is
116 almost always okay. It is normal for some things to be "NOT found",
117 since Configure often searches for many different ways of performing
120 At any Configure prompt, you can type &-d and Configure will use the
121 defaults from then on.
123 After it runs, Configure will perform variable substitution on all the
124 *.SH files and offer to run make depend.
126 The results of a Configure run are stored in the config.sh and Policy.sh
129 =head2 Common Configure options
131 Configure supports a number of useful options. Run
135 to get a listing. See the Porting/Glossary file for a complete list of
136 Configure variables you can set and their definitions.
142 To compile with gcc, if it's not the default compiler on your
143 system, you should run
145 sh Configure -Dcc=gcc
147 This is the preferred way to specify gcc (or any another alternative
148 compiler) so that the hints files can set appropriate defaults.
150 =item Installation prefix
152 By default, for most systems, perl will be installed in
153 /usr/local/{bin, lib, man}. (See L<"Installation Directories">
154 and L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> below for
157 You can specify a different 'prefix' for the default installation
158 directory when Configure prompts you, or by using the Configure command
159 line option -Dprefix='/some/directory', e.g.
161 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl
163 If your prefix contains the string "perl", then the suggested
164 directory structure is simplified. For example, if you use
165 prefix=/opt/perl, then Configure will suggest /opt/perl/lib instead of
166 /opt/perl/lib/perl5/. Again, see L<"Installation Directories"> below
167 for more details. Do not include a trailing slash, (i.e. /opt/perl/)
168 or you may experience odd test failures.
170 NOTE: You must not specify an installation directory that is the same
171 as or below your perl source directory. If you do, installperl will
172 attempt infinite recursion.
176 It may seem obvious, but Perl is useful only when users can easily
177 find it. It's often a good idea to have both /usr/bin/perl and
178 /usr/local/bin/perl be symlinks to the actual binary. Be especially
179 careful, however, not to overwrite a version of perl supplied by your
180 vendor unless you are sure you know what you are doing. If you insist
181 on replacing your vendor's perl, useful information on how it was
182 configured may be found with
186 (Check the output carefully, however, since this doesn't preserve
187 spaces in arguments to Configure. For that, you have to look carefully
188 at config_arg1, config_arg2, etc.)
190 By default, Configure will not try to link /usr/bin/perl to the current
191 version of perl. You can turn on that behavior by running
193 Configure -Dinstallusrbinperl
195 or by answering 'yes' to the appropriate Configure prompt.
197 In any case, system administrators are strongly encouraged to put
198 (symlinks to) perl and its accompanying utilities, such as perldoc,
199 into a directory typically found along a user's PATH, or in another
200 obvious and convenient place.
202 =item Building a development release
204 For development releases (odd subreleases, like 5.9.x) if you want to
205 use Configure -d, you will also need to supply -Dusedevel to Configure,
206 because the default answer to the question "do you really want to
207 Configure a development version?" is "no". The -Dusedevel skips that
212 If you are willing to accept all the defaults, and you want terse
217 =head2 Altering Configure variables for C compiler switches etc.
219 For most users, most of the Configure defaults are fine, or can easily
220 be set on the Configure command line. However, if Configure doesn't
221 have an option to do what you want, you can change Configure variables
222 after the platform hints have been run by using Configure's -A switch.
223 For example, here's how to add a couple of extra flags to C compiler
226 sh Configure -Accflags="-DPERL_EXTERNAL_GLOB -DNO_HASH_SEED"
228 To clarify, those ccflags values are not Configure options; if passed to
229 Configure directly, they won't do anything useful (they will define a
230 variable in config.sh, but without taking any action based upon it).
231 But when passed to the compiler, those flags will activate #ifdefd code.
233 For more help on Configure switches, run
237 =head2 Major Configure-time Build Options
239 There are several different ways to Configure and build perl for your
240 system. For most users, the defaults are sensible and will work.
241 Some users, however, may wish to further customize perl. Here are
242 some of the main things you can change.
246 On some platforms, perl can be compiled with support for threads. To
249 sh Configure -Dusethreads
251 The default is to compile without thread support.
253 Perl used to have two different internal threads implementations. The current
254 model (available internally since 5.6, and as a user-level module since 5.8) is
255 called interpreter-based implementation (ithreads), with one interpreter per
256 thread, and explicit sharing of data. The (deprecated) 5.005 version
257 (5005threads) was removed for release 5.10.
259 The 'threads' module is for use with the ithreads implementation. The
260 'Thread' module emulates the old 5005threads interface on top of the current
263 When using threads, perl uses a dynamically-sized buffer for some of
264 the thread-safe library calls, such as those in the getpw*() family.
265 This buffer starts small, but it will keep growing until the result
266 fits. To get a fixed upper limit, you should compile Perl with
267 PERL_REENTRANT_MAXSIZE defined to be the number of bytes you want. One
268 way to do this is to run Configure with
269 C<-Accflags=-DPERL_REENTRANT_MAXSIZE=65536>.
271 =head3 Large file support
273 Since Perl 5.6.0, Perl has supported large files (files larger than
274 2 gigabytes), and in many common platforms like Linux or Solaris this
275 support is on by default.
277 This is both good and bad. It is good in that you can use large files,
278 seek(), stat(), and -s them. It is bad in that if you are interfacing Perl
279 using some extension, the components you are connecting to must also
280 be large file aware: if Perl thinks files can be large but the other
281 parts of the software puzzle do not understand the concept, bad things
284 There's also one known limitation with the current large files
285 implementation: unless you also have 64-bit integers (see the next
286 section), you cannot use the printf/sprintf non-decimal integer formats
287 like C<%x> to print filesizes. You can use C<%d>, though.
289 If you want to compile perl without large file support, use
291 sh Configure -Uuselargefiles
293 =head3 64 bit support
295 If your platform does not run natively at 64 bits, but can simulate
296 them with compiler flags and/or C<long long> or C<int64_t>,
297 you can build a perl that uses 64 bits.
299 There are actually two modes of 64-bitness: the first one is achieved
300 using Configure -Duse64bitint and the second one using Configure
301 -Duse64bitall. The difference is that the first one is minimal and
302 the second one maximal. The first works in more places than the second.
304 The C<use64bitint> option does only as much as is required to get
305 64-bit integers into Perl (this may mean, for example, using "long
306 longs") while your memory may still be limited to 2 gigabytes (because
307 your pointers could still be 32-bit). Note that the name C<64bitint>
308 does not imply that your C compiler will be using 64-bit C<int>s (it
309 might, but it doesn't have to). The C<use64bitint> simply means that
310 you will be able to have 64 bit-wide scalar values.
312 The C<use64bitall> option goes all the way by attempting to switch
313 integers (if it can), longs (and pointers) to being 64-bit. This may
314 create an even more binary incompatible Perl than -Duse64bitint: the
315 resulting executable may not run at all in a 32-bit box, or you may
316 have to reboot/reconfigure/rebuild your operating system to be 64-bit
319 Natively 64-bit systems need neither -Duse64bitint nor -Duse64bitall.
320 On these systems, it might be the default compilation mode, and there
321 is currently no guarantee that passing no use64bitall option to the
322 Configure process will build a 32bit perl. Implementing -Duse32bit*
323 options is planned for a future release of perl.
327 In some systems you may be able to use long doubles to enhance the
328 range and precision of your double precision floating point numbers
329 (that is, Perl's numbers). Use Configure -Duselongdouble to enable
330 this support (if it is available).
332 Note that the exact format and range of long doubles varies:
333 the most common is the x86 80-bit (64 bits of mantissa) format,
334 but there are others, with different mantissa and exponent ranges.
335 In fact, the type may not be called "long double" at C level, and
336 therefore the C<uselongdouble> means "using floating point larger
341 You can "Configure -Dusemorebits" to turn on both the 64-bit support
342 and the long double support.
346 One option for long doubles is that gcc 4.6 and later have a library
347 called quadmath, which implements the IEEE 754 quadruple precision
348 (128-bit, 113 bits of mantissa) floating point numbers. The library
349 works at least on x86 and ia64 platforms. It may be part of your gcc
350 installation, or you may need to install it separately.
352 With "Configure -Dusequadmath" you can try enabling its use, but note
353 the compiler dependency, you may need to also add "-Dcc=...".
354 This option also turns on -Duselongdouble. At C level the type is called
355 C<__float128> (note, not "long double"), but Perl source knows it as NV.
357 =head3 Algorithmic Complexity Attacks on Hashes
359 Perl 5.18 reworked the measures used to secure its hash function
360 from algorithmic complexity attacks. By default it will build with
361 all of these measures enabled along with support for controlling and
362 disabling them via environment variables.
364 You can override various aspects of this feature by defining various
365 symbols during configure. An example might be:
367 Configure -Accflags=-DPERL_HASH_FUNC_SIPHASH
369 B<Unless stated otherwise these options are considered experimental or
370 insecure and are not recommended for production use.>
372 Perl 5.18 includes support for multiple hash functions, and changed
373 the default (to ONE_AT_A_TIME_HARD), you can choose a different
374 algorithm by defining one of the following symbols. Note that as of
375 Perl 5.18 we can only recommend use of the default or SIPHASH. All
376 the others are known to have security issues and are for research
379 PERL_HASH_FUNC_SIPHASH
382 PERL_HASH_FUNC_SUPERFAST
383 PERL_HASH_FUNC_MURMUR3
384 PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME
385 PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME_HARD
386 PERL_HASH_FUNC_ONE_AT_A_TIME_OLD
388 Perl 5.18 randomizes the order returned by keys(), values(), and each(),
389 and allows controlling this behavior by using of the PERL_PERTURB_KEYS
390 option. You can disable this option entirely with the define:
392 PERL_PERTURB_KEYS_DISABLED
394 You can disable the environment variable checks and specify the type of
395 key traversal randomization to be used by defining one of these:
397 PERL_PERTURB_KEYS_RANDOM
398 PERL_PERTURB_KEYS_DETERMINISTIC
400 In Perl 5.18 the seed used for the hash function is randomly selected
401 at process start which can be overridden by specifying a seed by setting
402 the PERL_HASH_SEED environment variable.
404 You can change this behavior by building perl with the
406 USE_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT
408 define, in which case one has to explicitly set the PERL_HASH_SEED
409 environment variable to enable the security feature or by adding
413 to the compilation flags to completely disable the randomisation feature.
414 Note these modes are poorly tested, insecure and not recommended.
416 B<Perl has never guaranteed any ordering of the hash keys>, and the
417 ordering has already changed several times during the lifetime of Perl
418 5. Also, the ordering of hash keys has always been, and continues to
419 be, affected by the insertion order. Note that because of this
420 randomisation for example the Data::Dumper results will be different
421 between different runs of Perl, since Data::Dumper by default dumps
422 hashes "unordered". The use of the Data::Dumper C<Sortkeys> option is
425 See L<perlrun/PERL_HASH_SEED> and L<perlrun/PERL_PERTURB_KEYS> for details on
426 the environment variables, and L<perlsec/Algorithmic Complexity Attacks> for
427 further security details.
431 Perl can be configured to be 'socksified', that is, to use the SOCKS
432 TCP/IP proxy protocol library. SOCKS is used to give applications
433 access to transport layer network proxies. Perl supports only SOCKS
434 Version 5. The corresponding Configure option is -Dusesocks.
435 You can find more about SOCKS from wikipedia at
436 L<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS>.
438 =head3 Dynamic Loading
440 By default, Configure will compile perl to use dynamic loading.
441 If you want to force perl to be compiled completely
442 statically, you can either choose this when Configure prompts you or
443 you can use the Configure command line option -Uusedl.
444 With this option, you won't be able to use any new extension
445 (XS) module without recompiling perl itself.
447 =head3 Building a shared Perl library
449 Currently, for most systems, the main perl executable is built by
450 linking the "perl library" libperl.a with perlmain.o, your static
451 extensions, and various extra libraries, such as -lm.
453 On systems that support dynamic loading, it may be possible to
454 replace libperl.a with a shared libperl.so. If you anticipate building
455 several different perl binaries (e.g. by embedding libperl into
456 different programs, or by using the optional compiler extension), then
457 you might wish to build a shared libperl.so so that all your binaries
458 can share the same library.
460 The disadvantages are that there may be a significant performance
461 penalty associated with the shared libperl.so, and that the overall
462 mechanism is still rather fragile with respect to different versions
465 In terms of performance, on my test system (Solaris 2.5_x86) the perl
466 test suite took roughly 15% longer to run with the shared libperl.so.
467 Your system and typical applications may well give quite different
470 The default name for the shared library is typically something like
471 libperl.so.5.8.8 (for Perl 5.8.8), or libperl.so.588, or simply
472 libperl.so. Configure tries to guess a sensible naming convention
473 based on your C library name. Since the library gets installed in a
474 version-specific architecture-dependent directory, the exact name
475 isn't very important anyway, as long as your linker is happy.
477 You can elect to build a shared libperl by
479 sh Configure -Duseshrplib
481 To build a shared libperl, the environment variable controlling shared
482 library search (LD_LIBRARY_PATH in most systems, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for
483 Darwin, LD_LIBRARY_PATH/SHLIB_PATH
484 for HP-UX, LIBPATH for AIX, PATH for Cygwin) must be set up to include
485 the Perl build directory because that's where the shared libperl will
486 be created. Configure arranges makefile to have the correct shared
487 library search settings. You can find the name of the environment
488 variable Perl thinks works in your your system by
490 grep ldlibpthname config.sh
492 However, there are some special cases where manually setting the
493 shared library path might be required. For example, if you want to run
494 something like the following with the newly-built but not-yet-installed
497 ./perl -MTestInit t/misc/failing_test.t
501 ./perl -Ilib ~/my_mission_critical_test
503 then you need to set up the shared library path explicitly.
506 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
508 for Bourne-style shells, or
510 setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH `pwd`
512 for Csh-style shells. (This procedure may also be needed if for some
513 unexpected reason Configure fails to set up makefile correctly.) (And
514 again, it may be something other than LD_LIBRARY_PATH for you, see above.)
516 You can often recognize failures to build/use a shared libperl from error
517 messages complaining about a missing libperl.so (or libperl.sl in HP-UX),
520 18126:./miniperl: /sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
522 There is also an potential problem with the shared perl library if you
523 want to have more than one "flavor" of the same version of perl (e.g.
524 with and without -DDEBUGGING). For example, suppose you build and
525 install a standard Perl 5.10.0 with a shared library. Then, suppose you
526 try to build Perl 5.10.0 with -DDEBUGGING enabled, but everything else
527 the same, including all the installation directories. How can you
528 ensure that your newly built perl will link with your newly built
529 libperl.so.8 rather with the installed libperl.so.8? The answer is
530 that you might not be able to. The installation directory is encoded
531 in the perl binary with the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable (or
532 equivalent ld command-line option). On Solaris, you can override that
533 with LD_LIBRARY_PATH; on Linux, you can only override at runtime via
534 LD_PRELOAD, specifying the exact filename you wish to be used; and on
535 Digital Unix, you can override LD_LIBRARY_PATH by setting the
536 _RLD_ROOT environment variable to point to the perl build directory.
538 In other words, it is generally not a good idea to try to build a perl
539 with a shared library if $archlib/CORE/$libperl already exists from a
542 A good workaround is to specify a different directory for the
543 architecture-dependent library for your -DDEBUGGING version of perl.
544 You can do this by changing all the *archlib* variables in config.sh to
545 point to your new architecture-dependent library.
547 =head3 Environment access
549 Perl often needs to write to the program's environment, such as when C<%ENV>
550 is assigned to. Many implementations of the C library function C<putenv()>
551 leak memory, so where possible perl will manipulate the environment directly
552 to avoid these leaks. The default is now to perform direct manipulation
553 whenever perl is running as a stand alone interpreter, and to call the safe
554 but potentially leaky C<putenv()> function when the perl interpreter is
555 embedded in another application. You can force perl to always use C<putenv()>
556 by compiling with C<-Accflags="-DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV">, see section
557 L</"Altering Configure variables for C compiler switches etc.">.
558 You can force an embedded perl to use direct manipulation by setting
559 C<PL_use_safe_putenv = 0;> after the C<perl_construct()> call.
561 =head2 Installation Directories
563 The installation directories can all be changed by answering the
564 appropriate questions in Configure. For convenience, all the installation
565 questions are near the beginning of Configure. Do not include trailing
566 slashes on directory names. At any point during the Configure process,
567 you can answer a question with &-d and Configure will use the defaults
568 from then on. Alternatively, you can
570 grep '^install' config.sh
572 after Configure has run to verify the installation paths.
574 The defaults are intended to be reasonable and sensible for most
575 people building from sources. Those who build and distribute binary
576 distributions or who export perl to a range of systems will probably
577 need to alter them. If you are content to just accept the defaults,
578 you can safely skip the next section.
580 The directories set up by Configure fall into three broad categories.
584 =item Directories for the perl distribution
586 By default, Configure will use the following directories for 5.21.5.
587 $version is the full perl version number, including subversion, e.g.
588 5.12.3, and $archname is a string like sun4-sunos,
589 determined by Configure. The full definitions of all Configure
590 variables are in the file Porting/Glossary.
592 Configure variable Default value
593 $prefixexp /usr/local
594 $binexp $prefixexp/bin
595 $scriptdirexp $prefixexp/bin
596 $privlibexp $prefixexp/lib/perl5/$version
597 $archlibexp $prefixexp/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
598 $man1direxp $prefixexp/man/man1
599 $man3direxp $prefixexp/man/man3
603 $prefixexp is generated from $prefix, with ~ expansion done to convert home
604 directories into absolute paths. Similarly for the other variables listed. As
605 file system calls do not do this, you should always reference the ...exp
606 variables, to support users who build perl in their home directory.
608 Actually, Configure recognizes the SVR3-style
609 /usr/local/man/l_man/man1 directories, if present, and uses those
610 instead. Also, if $prefix contains the string "perl", the library
611 directories are simplified as described below. For simplicity, only
612 the common style is shown here.
614 =item Directories for site-specific add-on files
616 After perl is installed, you may later wish to add modules (e.g. from
617 CPAN) or scripts. Configure will set up the following directories to
618 be used for installing those add-on modules and scripts.
622 $siteprefixexp $prefixexp
623 $sitebinexp $siteprefixexp/bin
624 $sitescriptexp $siteprefixexp/bin
625 $sitelibexp $siteprefixexp/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
627 $siteprefixexp/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
628 $siteman1direxp $siteprefixexp/man/man1
629 $siteman3direxp $siteprefixexp/man/man3
630 $sitehtml1direxp (none)
631 $sitehtml3direxp (none)
633 By default, ExtUtils::MakeMaker will install architecture-independent
634 modules into $sitelib and architecture-dependent modules into $sitearch.
636 =item Directories for vendor-supplied add-on files
638 Lastly, if you are building a binary distribution of perl for
639 distribution, Configure can optionally set up the following directories
640 for you to use to distribute add-on modules.
644 $vendorprefixexp (none)
646 (The next ones are set only if vendorprefix is set.)
648 $vendorbinexp $vendorprefixexp/bin
649 $vendorscriptexp $vendorprefixexp/bin
650 $vendorlibexp $vendorprefixexp/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
652 $vendorprefixexp/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
653 $vendorman1direxp $vendorprefixexp/man/man1
654 $vendorman3direxp $vendorprefixexp/man/man3
655 $vendorhtml1direxp (none)
656 $vendorhtml3direxp (none)
658 These are normally empty, but may be set as needed. For example,
659 a vendor might choose the following settings:
662 $siteprefix /usr/local
665 This would have the effect of setting the following:
668 $scriptdirexp /usr/bin
669 $privlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/$version
670 $archlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
671 $man1direxp /usr/man/man1
672 $man3direxp /usr/man/man3
674 $sitebinexp /usr/local/bin
675 $sitescriptexp /usr/local/bin
676 $sitelibexp /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
677 $sitearchexp /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
678 $siteman1direxp /usr/local/man/man1
679 $siteman3direxp /usr/local/man/man3
681 $vendorbinexp /usr/bin
682 $vendorscriptexp /usr/bin
683 $vendorlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
684 $vendorarchexp /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
685 $vendorman1direxp /usr/man/man1
686 $vendorman3direxp /usr/man/man3
688 Note how in this example, the vendor-supplied directories are in the
689 /usr hierarchy, while the directories reserved for the end user are in
690 the /usr/local hierarchy.
692 The entire installed library hierarchy is installed in locations with
693 version numbers, keeping the installations of different versions distinct.
694 However, later installations of Perl can still be configured to search the
695 installed libraries corresponding to compatible earlier versions.
696 See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> below for more details
697 on how Perl can be made to search older version directories.
699 Of course you may use these directories however you see fit. For
700 example, you may wish to use $siteprefix for site-specific files that
701 are stored locally on your own disk and use $vendorprefix for
702 site-specific files that are stored elsewhere on your organization's
703 network. One way to do that would be something like
705 sh Configure -Dsiteprefix=/usr/local -Dvendorprefix=/usr/share/perl
709 As a final catch-all, Configure also offers an $otherlibdirs
710 variable. This variable contains a colon-separated list of additional
711 directories to add to @INC. By default, it will be empty.
712 Perl will search these directories (including architecture and
713 version-specific subdirectories) for add-on modules and extensions.
715 For example, if you have a bundle of perl libraries from a previous
716 installation, perhaps in a strange place:
718 Configure -Dotherlibdirs=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1
722 There is one other way of adding paths to @INC at perl build time, and
723 that is by setting the APPLLIB_EXP C pre-processor token to a colon-
724 separated list of directories, like this
726 sh Configure -Accflags='-DAPPLLIB_EXP=\"/usr/libperl\"'
728 The directories defined by APPLLIB_EXP get added to @INC I<first>,
729 ahead of any others, and so provide a way to override the standard perl
730 modules should you, for example, want to distribute fixes without
731 touching the perl distribution proper. And, like otherlib dirs,
732 version and architecture specific subdirectories are also searched, if
733 present, at run time. Of course, you can still search other @INC
734 directories ahead of those in APPLLIB_EXP by using any of the standard
735 run-time methods: $PERLLIB, $PERL5LIB, -I, use lib, etc.
737 =item usesitecustomize
739 Run-time customization of @INC can be enabled with:
741 sh Configure -Dusesitecustomize
743 which will define USE_SITECUSTOMIZE and $Config{usesitecustomize}.
744 When enabled, this makes perl run F<$sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl> before
745 anything else. This script can then be set up to add additional
750 By default, man pages will be installed in $man1dir and $man3dir, which
751 are normally /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man3. If you
752 want to use a .3pm suffix for perl man pages, you can do that with
754 sh Configure -Dman3ext=3pm
758 Currently, the standard perl installation does not do anything with
759 HTML documentation, but that may change in the future. Further, some
760 add-on modules may wish to install HTML documents. The html Configure
761 variables listed above are provided if you wish to specify where such
762 documents should be placed. The default is "none", but will likely
763 eventually change to something useful based on user feedback.
767 Some users prefer to append a "/share" to $privlib and $sitelib
768 to emphasize that those directories can be shared among different
771 Note that these are just the defaults. You can actually structure the
772 directories any way you like. They don't even have to be on the same
775 Further details about the installation directories, maintenance and
776 development subversions, and about supporting multiple versions are
777 discussed in L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> below.
779 If you specify a prefix that contains the string "perl", then the
780 library directory structure is slightly simplified. Instead of
781 suggesting $prefix/lib/perl5/, Configure will suggest $prefix/lib.
783 Thus, for example, if you Configure with
784 -Dprefix=/opt/perl, then the default library directories for 5.9.0 are
786 Configure variable Default value
787 $privlib /opt/perl/lib/5.9.0
788 $archlib /opt/perl/lib/5.9.0/$archname
789 $sitelib /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.9.0
790 $sitearch /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.9.0/$archname
792 =head2 Changing the installation directory
794 Configure distinguishes between the directory in which perl (and its
795 associated files) should be installed, and the directory in which it
796 will eventually reside. For most sites, these two are the same; for
797 sites that use AFS, this distinction is handled automatically.
798 However, sites that use package management software such as rpm or
799 dpkg, or users building binary packages for distribution may also
800 wish to install perl into a different directory before moving perl
801 to its final destination. There are two ways to do that:
807 To install perl under the /tmp/perl5 directory, use the following
810 sh Configure -Dinstallprefix=/tmp/perl5
812 (replace /tmp/perl5 by a directory of your choice).
814 Beware, though, that if you go to try to install new add-on
815 modules, they too will get installed in under '/tmp/perl5' if you
816 follow this example. That's why it's usually better to use DESTDIR,
817 as shown in the next section.
821 If you need to install perl on many identical systems, it is convenient
822 to compile it once and create an archive that can be installed on
823 multiple systems. Suppose, for example, that you want to create an
824 archive that can be installed in /opt/perl. One way to do that is by
825 using the DESTDIR variable during C<make install>. The DESTDIR is
826 automatically prepended to all the installation paths. Thus you
829 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl -des
832 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/perl5
833 cd /tmp/perl5/opt/perl
834 tar cvf /tmp/perl5-archive.tar .
838 =head2 Relocatable @INC
840 To create a relocatable perl tree, use the following command line:
842 sh Configure -Duserelocatableinc
844 Then the paths in @INC (and everything else in %Config) can be
845 optionally located via the path of the perl executable.
847 That means that, if the string ".../" is found at the start of any
848 path, it's substituted with the directory of $^X. So, the relocation
849 can be configured on a per-directory basis, although the default with
850 "-Duserelocatableinc" is that everything is relocated. The initial
851 install is done to the original configured prefix.
853 This option is not compatible with the building of a shared libperl
854 ("-Duseshrplib"), because in that case perl is linked with an hard-coded
855 rpath that points at the libperl.so, that cannot be relocated.
857 =head2 Site-wide Policy settings
859 After Configure runs, it stores a number of common site-wide "policy"
860 answers (such as installation directories) in the Policy.sh file.
861 If you want to build perl on another system using the same policy
862 defaults, simply copy the Policy.sh file to the new system's perl build
863 directory, and Configure will use it. This will work even if Policy.sh was
864 generated for another version of Perl, or on a system with a
865 different architecture and/or operating system. However, in such cases,
866 you should review the contents of the file before using it: for
867 example, your new target may not keep its man pages in the same place
868 as the system on which the file was generated.
870 Alternatively, if you wish to change some or all of those policy
875 to ensure that Configure doesn't re-use them.
877 Further information is in the Policy_sh.SH file itself.
879 If the generated Policy.sh file is unsuitable, you may freely edit it
880 to contain any valid shell commands. It will be run just after the
881 platform-specific hints files.
883 =head2 Disabling older versions of Perl
885 Configure will search for binary compatible versions of previously
886 installed perl binaries in the tree that is specified as target tree,
887 and these will be used as locations to search for modules by the perl
888 being built. The list of perl versions found will be put in the Configure
889 variable inc_version_list.
891 To disable this use of older perl modules, even completely valid pure perl
892 modules, you can specify to not include the paths found:
894 sh Configure -Dinc_version_list=none ...
896 If you do want to use modules from some previous perl versions, the variable
897 must contain a space separated list of directories under the site_perl
898 directory, and has to include architecture-dependent directories separately,
901 sh Configure -Dinc_version_list="5.16.0/x86_64-linux 5.16.0" ...
903 When using the newer perl, you can add these paths again in the
904 PERL5LIB environment variable or with perl's -I runtime option.
906 =head2 Building Perl outside of the source directory
908 Sometimes it is desirable to build Perl in a directory different from
909 where the sources are, for example if you want to keep your sources
910 read-only, or if you want to share the sources between different binary
911 architectures. You can do this (if your file system supports symbolic
914 mkdir /tmp/perl/build/directory
915 cd /tmp/perl/build/directory
916 sh /path/to/perl/source/Configure -Dmksymlinks ...
918 This will create in /tmp/perl/build/directory a tree of symbolic links
919 pointing to files in /path/to/perl/source. The original files are left
920 unaffected. After Configure has finished you can just say
926 as usual, and Perl will be built in /tmp/perl/build/directory.
928 =head2 Building a debugging perl
930 You can run perl scripts under the perl debugger at any time with
931 B<perl -d your_script>. If, however, you want to debug perl itself,
932 you probably want to have support for perl internal debugging code
933 (activated by adding -DDEBUGGING to ccflags), and/or support for the
934 system debugger by adding -g to the optimisation flags. For that,
937 sh Configure -DDEBUGGING
941 sh Configure -DDEBUGGING=<mode>
943 For a more eye appealing call, -DEBUGGING is defined to be an alias
944 for -DDEBUGGING. For both, the -U calls are also supported, in order
945 to be able to overrule the hints or Policy.sh settings.
947 Here are the DEBUGGING modes:
955 =item -DEBUGGING=both
957 Sets both -DDEBUGGING in the ccflags, and adds -g to optimize.
959 You can actually specify -g and -DDEBUGGING independently (see below),
960 but usually it's convenient to have both.
966 Adds -g to optimize, but does not set -DDEBUGGING.
968 (Note: Your system may actually require something like cc -g2.
969 Check your man pages for cc(1) and also any hint file for your system.)
971 =item -DEBUGGING=none
975 Removes -g from optimize, and -DDEBUGGING from ccflags.
979 If you are using a shared libperl, see the warnings about multiple
980 versions of perl under L<Building a shared Perl library>.
982 Note that a perl built with -DDEBUGGING will be much bigger and will run
983 much, much more slowly than a standard perl.
985 =head2 DTrace support
987 On platforms where DTrace is available, it may be enabled by
988 using the -Dusedtrace option to Configure. DTrace probes are available for
989 subroutine entry (sub-entry) and subroutine exit (sub-exit). Here's a
990 simple D script that uses them:
992 perl$target:::sub-entry, perl$target:::sub-return {
993 printf("%s %s (%s:%d)\n", probename == "sub-entry" ? "->" : "<-",
994 copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg1), arg2);
1000 Perl ships with a number of standard extensions. These are contained
1001 in the ext/ subdirectory.
1003 By default, Configure will offer to build every extension which appears
1004 to be supported. For example, Configure will offer to build GDBM_File
1005 only if it is able to find the gdbm library.
1007 To disable certain extensions so that they are not built, use the
1008 -Dnoextensions=... and -Donlyextensions=... options. They both accept
1009 a space-separated list of extensions, such as C<IPC/SysV>. The extensions
1011 C<noextensions> are removed from the list of extensions to build, while
1012 the C<onlyextensions> is rather more severe and builds only the listed
1013 extensions. The latter should be used with extreme caution since
1014 certain extensions are used by many other extensions and modules:
1015 examples of such modules include Fcntl and IO. The order of processing
1016 these options is first C<only> (if present), then C<no> (if present).
1018 Of course, you may always run Configure interactively and select only
1019 the extensions you want.
1021 If you unpack any additional extensions in the ext/ directory before
1022 running Configure, then Configure will offer to build those additional
1023 extensions as well. Most users probably shouldn't have to do this --
1024 it is usually easier to build additional extensions later after perl
1025 has been installed. However, if you wish to have those additional
1026 extensions statically linked into the perl binary, then this offers a
1027 convenient way to do that in one step. (It is not necessary, however;
1028 you can build and install extensions just fine even if you don't have
1029 dynamic loading. See lib/ExtUtils/MakeMaker.pm for more details.)
1030 Another way of specifying extra modules is described in
1031 L<"Adding extra modules to the build"> below.
1033 If you re-use an old config.sh but change your system (e.g. by
1034 adding libgdbm) Configure will still offer your old choices of extensions
1035 for the default answer, but it will also point out the discrepancy to
1038 =head2 Including locally-installed libraries
1040 Perl comes with interfaces to number of libraries, including threads,
1041 dbm, ndbm, gdbm, and Berkeley db. For the *db* extension, if
1042 Configure can find the appropriate header files and libraries, it will
1043 automatically include that extension. The threading extension needs
1044 to be specified explicitly (see L</Threads>).
1046 Those libraries are not distributed with perl. If your header (.h) files
1047 for those libraries are not in a directory normally searched by your C
1048 compiler, then you will need to include the appropriate -I/your/directory
1049 option when prompted by Configure. If your libraries are not in a
1050 directory normally searched by your C compiler and linker, then you will
1051 need to include the appropriate -L/your/directory option when prompted
1052 by Configure. See the examples below.
1058 =item gdbm in /usr/local
1060 Suppose you have gdbm and want Configure to find it and build the
1061 GDBM_File extension. This example assumes you have gdbm.h
1062 installed in /usr/local/include/gdbm.h and libgdbm.a installed in
1063 /usr/local/lib/libgdbm.a. Configure should figure all the
1064 necessary steps out automatically.
1066 Specifically, when Configure prompts you for flags for
1067 your C compiler, you should include -I/usr/local/include, if it's
1068 not here yet. Similarly, when Configure prompts you for linker flags,
1069 you should include -L/usr/local/lib.
1071 If you are using dynamic loading, then when Configure prompts you for
1072 linker flags for dynamic loading, you should again include
1075 Again, this should all happen automatically. This should also work if
1076 you have gdbm installed in any of (/usr/local, /opt/local, /usr/gnu,
1077 /opt/gnu, /usr/GNU, or /opt/GNU).
1079 =item BerkeleyDB in /usr/local/BerkeleyDB
1081 The version of BerkeleyDB distributed by Oracle installs in a
1082 version-specific directory by default, typically something like
1083 /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7. To have Configure find that, you need to add
1084 -I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include to cc flags, as in the previous example,
1085 and you will also have to take extra steps to help Configure find -ldb.
1086 Specifically, when Configure prompts you for library directories,
1087 add /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib to the list. Also, you will need to
1088 add appropriate linker flags to tell the runtime linker where to find the
1089 BerkeleyDB shared libraries.
1091 It is possible to specify this from the command line (all on one
1095 -Dlocincpth='/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include \
1096 /usr/local/include' \
1097 -Dloclibpth='/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib /usr/local/lib' \
1098 -Aldflags='-R/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib'
1100 locincpth is a space-separated list of include directories to search.
1101 Configure will automatically add the appropriate -I directives.
1103 loclibpth is a space-separated list of library directories to search.
1104 Configure will automatically add the appropriate -L directives.
1106 The addition to ldflags is so that the dynamic linker knows where to find
1107 the BerkeleyDB libraries. For Linux and Solaris, the -R option does that.
1108 Other systems may use different flags. Use the appropriate flag for your
1113 =head2 Specifying a logical root directory
1115 If you are cross-compiling, or are using a compiler which has it's own
1116 headers and libraries in a nonstandard location, and your compiler
1117 understands the C<--sysroot> option, you can use the C<-Dsysroot> option to
1118 specify the logical root directory under which all libraries and headers
1119 are searched for. This patch adjusts Configure to search under $sysroot, instead of /.
1121 --sysroot is added to ccflags and friends so that make in
1122 ExtUtils::MakeMaker, and other extensions, will use it.
1124 =head2 Overriding an old config.sh
1126 If you want to use an old config.sh produced by a previous run of
1127 Configure, but override some of the items with command line options, you
1128 need to use B<Configure -O>.
1130 =head2 GNU-style configure
1132 If you prefer the GNU-style configure command line interface, you can
1133 use the supplied configure.gnu command, e.g.
1135 CC=gcc ./configure.gnu
1137 The configure.gnu script emulates a few of the more common configure
1140 ./configure.gnu --help
1144 (The file is called configure.gnu to avoid problems on systems
1145 that would not distinguish the files "Configure" and "configure".)
1147 =head2 Malloc Issues
1149 Perl relies heavily on malloc(3) to grow data structures as needed,
1150 so perl's performance can be noticeably affected by the performance of
1151 the malloc function on your system. The perl source is shipped with a
1152 version of malloc that has been optimized for the typical requests from
1153 perl, so there's a chance that it may be both faster and use less memory
1154 than your system malloc.
1156 However, if your system already has an excellent malloc, or if you are
1157 experiencing difficulties with extensions that use third-party libraries
1158 that call malloc, then you should probably use your system's malloc.
1159 (Or, you might wish to explore the malloc flags discussed below.)
1163 =item Using the system malloc
1165 To build without perl's malloc, you can use the Configure command
1167 sh Configure -Uusemymalloc
1169 or you can answer 'n' at the appropriate interactive Configure prompt.
1171 Note that Perl's malloc isn't always used by default; that actually
1172 depends on your system. For example, on Linux and FreeBSD (and many more
1173 systems), Configure chooses to use the system's malloc by default.
1174 See the appropriate file in the F<hints/> directory to see how the
1177 =item -DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC
1179 NOTE: This flag is enabled automatically on some platforms if you just
1180 run Configure to accept all the defaults.
1182 Perl's malloc family of functions are normally called Perl_malloc(),
1183 Perl_realloc(), Perl_calloc() and Perl_mfree().
1184 These names do not clash with the system versions of these functions.
1186 If this flag is enabled, however, Perl's malloc family of functions
1187 will have the same names as the system versions. This may be required
1188 sometimes if you have libraries that like to free() data that may have
1189 been allocated by Perl_malloc() and vice versa.
1191 Note that enabling this option may sometimes lead to duplicate symbols
1192 from the linker for malloc et al. In such cases, the system probably
1193 does not allow its malloc functions to be fully replaced with custom
1196 =item -DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS
1198 This flag enables debugging mstats, which is required to use the
1199 Devel::Peek::mstat() function. You cannot enable this unless you are
1200 using Perl's malloc, so a typical Configure command would be
1202 sh Configure -Accflags=-DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS -Dusemymalloc
1204 to enable this option.
1208 =head2 What if it doesn't work?
1210 If you run into problems, try some of the following ideas.
1211 If none of them help, then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
1215 =item Running Configure Interactively
1217 If Configure runs into trouble, remember that you can always run
1218 Configure interactively so that you can check (and correct) its
1221 All the installation questions have been moved to the top, so you don't
1222 have to wait for them. Once you've handled them (and your C compiler and
1223 flags) you can type &-d at the next Configure prompt and Configure
1224 will use the defaults from then on.
1226 If you find yourself trying obscure command line incantations and
1227 config.over tricks, I recommend you run Configure interactively
1228 instead. You'll probably save yourself time in the long run.
1232 Hint files tell Configure about a number of things:
1238 The peculiarities or conventions of particular platforms -- non-standard
1239 library locations and names, default installation locations for binaries,
1244 The deficiencies of the platform -- for example, library functions that,
1245 although present, are too badly broken to be usable; or limits on
1246 resources that are generously available on most platforms.
1250 How best to optimize for the platform, both in terms of binary size and/or
1251 speed, and for Perl feature support. Because of wide variations in the
1252 implementation of shared libraries and of threading, for example, Configure
1253 often needs hints in order to be able to use these features.
1257 The perl distribution includes many system-specific hints files
1258 in the hints/ directory. If one of them matches your system, Configure
1259 will offer to use that hint file. Unless you have a very good reason
1260 not to, you should accept its offer.
1262 Several of the hint files contain additional important information.
1263 If you have any problems, it is a good idea to read the relevant hint file
1264 for further information. See hints/solaris_2.sh for an extensive example.
1265 More information about writing good hints is in the hints/README.hints
1266 file, which also explains hint files known as callback-units.
1268 Note that any hint file is read before any Policy file, meaning that
1269 Policy overrides hints -- see L</Site-wide Policy settings>.
1273 If you are re-using an old config.sh, it's possible that Configure detects
1274 different values from the ones specified in this file. You will almost
1275 always want to keep the previous value, unless you have changed something
1278 For example, suppose you have added libgdbm.a to your system
1279 and you decide to reconfigure perl to use GDBM_File. When you run
1280 Configure again, you will need to add -lgdbm to the list of libraries.
1281 Now, Configure will find your gdbm include file and library and will
1284 *** WHOA THERE!!! ***
1285 The previous value for $i_gdbm on this machine was "undef"!
1286 Keep the previous value? [y]
1288 In this case, you do not want to keep the previous value, so you
1289 should answer 'n'. (You'll also have to manually add GDBM_File to
1290 the list of dynamic extensions to build.)
1292 =item Changing Compilers
1294 If you change compilers or make other significant changes, you should
1295 probably not re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or
1296 rename it, then rerun Configure with the options you want to use.
1298 =item Propagating your changes to config.sh
1300 If you make any changes to config.sh, you should propagate
1301 them to all the .SH files by running
1305 You will then have to rebuild by running
1310 =item config.over and config.arch
1312 You can also supply a shell script config.over to override
1313 Configure's guesses. It will get loaded up at the very end, just
1314 before config.sh is created. You have to be careful with this,
1315 however, as Configure does no checking that your changes make sense.
1316 This file is usually good for site-specific customizations.
1318 There is also another file that, if it exists, is loaded before the
1319 config.over, called config.arch. This file is intended to be per
1320 architecture, not per site, and usually it's the architecture-specific
1321 hints file that creates the config.arch.
1325 Many of the system dependencies are contained in config.h.
1326 Configure builds config.h by running the config_h.SH script.
1327 The values for the variables are taken from config.sh.
1329 If there are any problems, you can edit config.h directly. Beware,
1330 though, that the next time you run Configure, your changes will be
1335 If you have any additional changes to make to the C compiler command
1336 line, they can be made in cflags.SH. For instance, to turn off the
1337 optimizer on toke.c, find the switch structure marked 'or customize here',
1338 and add a line for toke.c ahead of the catch-all *) so that it now reads:
1343 toke) optimize='-g' ;;
1346 You should not edit the generated file cflags directly, as your changes will
1347 be lost the next time you run Configure, or if you edit config.sh.
1349 To explore various ways of changing ccflags from within a hint file,
1350 see the file hints/README.hints.
1352 To change the C flags for all the files, edit config.sh and change either
1353 $ccflags or $optimize, and then re-run
1360 If you don't have sh, you'll have to copy the sample file
1361 Porting/config.sh to config.sh and edit your config.sh to reflect your
1362 system's peculiarities. See Porting/pumpkin.pod for more information.
1363 You'll probably also have to extensively modify the extension building
1366 =item Porting information
1368 Specific information for the OS/2, Plan 9, VMS and Win32 ports is in the
1369 corresponding README files and subdirectories. Additional information,
1370 including a glossary of all those config.sh variables, is in the Porting
1371 subdirectory. Porting/Glossary should especially come in handy.
1373 Ports for other systems may also be available. You should check out
1374 http://www.cpan.org/ports for current information on ports to
1375 various other operating systems.
1377 If you plan to port Perl to a new architecture, study carefully the
1378 section titled "Philosophical Issues in Patching and Porting Perl"
1379 in the file Porting/pumpkin.pod and the file pod/perlgit.pod.
1380 Study also how other non-UNIX ports have solved problems.
1384 =head2 Adding extra modules to the build
1386 You can specify extra modules or module bundles to be fetched from the
1387 CPAN and installed as part of the Perl build. Either use the -Dextras=...
1388 command line parameter to Configure, for example like this:
1390 Configure -Dextras="Bundle::LWP DBI"
1392 or answer first 'y' to the question 'Install any extra modules?' and
1393 then answer "Bundle::LWP DBI" to the 'Extras?' question.
1394 The module or the bundle names are as for the CPAN module 'install' command.
1395 This will only work if those modules are to be built as dynamic
1396 extensions. If you wish to include those extra modules as static
1397 extensions, see L<"Extensions"> above.
1399 Notice that because the CPAN module will be used to fetch the extra
1400 modules, you will need access to the CPAN, either via the Internet,
1401 or via a local copy such as a CD-ROM or a local CPAN mirror. If you
1402 do not, using the extra modules option will die horribly.
1404 Also notice that you yourself are responsible for satisfying any extra
1405 dependencies such as external headers or libraries BEFORE trying the build.
1406 For example: you will need to have the Foo database specific
1407 headers and libraries installed for the DBD::Foo module. The Configure
1408 process or the Perl build process will not help you with these.
1412 suidperl was an optional component of earlier releases of perl. It is no
1413 longer available. Instead, use a tool specifically designed to handle
1414 changes in privileges, such as B<sudo>.
1418 This will look for all the includes. The output is stored in makefile.
1419 The only difference between Makefile and makefile is the dependencies at
1420 the bottom of makefile. If you have to make any changes, you should edit
1421 makefile, not Makefile, since the Unix make command reads makefile first.
1422 (On non-Unix systems, the output may be stored in a different file.
1423 Check the value of $firstmakefile in your config.sh if in doubt.)
1425 Configure will offer to do this step for you, so it isn't listed
1430 This will attempt to make perl in the current directory.
1432 =head2 Expected errors
1434 These error reports are normal, and can be ignored:
1437 make: [extra.pods] Error 1 (ignored)
1439 make: [extras.make] Error 1 (ignored)
1441 =head2 What if it doesn't work?
1443 If you can't compile successfully, try some of the following ideas.
1444 If none of them help, and careful reading of the error message and
1445 the relevant manual pages on your system doesn't help,
1446 then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
1452 If you used a hint file, try reading the comments in the hint file
1453 for further tips and information.
1457 If you can successfully build miniperl, but the process crashes
1458 during the building of extensions, run
1462 to test your version of miniperl.
1466 If you have any locale-related environment variables set, try unsetting
1467 them. I have some reports that some versions of IRIX hang while
1468 running B<./miniperl configpm> with locales other than the C locale.
1469 See the discussion under L<"make test"> below about locales and the
1470 whole L<perllocale/"LOCALE PROBLEMS"> section in the file pod/perllocale.pod.
1471 The latter is especially useful if you see something like this
1473 perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
1474 perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
1477 are supported and installed on your system.
1478 perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
1482 =item other environment variables
1484 Configure does not check for environment variables that can sometimes
1485 have a major influence on how perl is built or tested. For example,
1486 OBJECT_MODE on AIX determines the way the compiler and linker deal with
1487 their objects, but this is a variable that only influences build-time
1488 behaviour, and should not affect the perl scripts that are eventually
1489 executed by the perl binary. Other variables, like PERL_UNICODE,
1490 PERL5LIB, and PERL5OPT will influence the behaviour of the test suite.
1491 So if you are getting strange test failures, you may want to try
1492 retesting with the various PERL variables unset.
1496 If you get varargs problems with gcc, be sure that gcc is installed
1497 correctly and that you are not passing -I/usr/include to gcc. When using
1498 gcc, you should probably have i_stdarg='define' and i_varargs='undef'
1499 in config.sh. The problem is usually solved by installing gcc
1500 correctly. If you do change config.sh, don't forget to propagate
1501 your changes (see L<"Propagating your changes to config.sh"> below).
1502 See also the L<"vsprintf"> item below.
1506 If you get error messages such as the following (the exact line
1507 numbers and function name may vary in different versions of perl):
1509 util.c: In function 'Perl_form':
1510 util.c:1107: number of arguments doesn't match prototype
1511 proto.h:125: prototype declaration
1513 it might well be a symptom of the gcc "varargs problem". See the
1514 previous L<"varargs"> item.
1516 =item LD_LIBRARY_PATH
1518 If you run into dynamic loading problems, check your setting of
1519 the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If you're creating a static
1520 Perl library (libperl.a rather than libperl.so) it should build
1521 fine with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset, though that may depend on details
1522 of your local setup.
1526 If Configure seems to be having trouble finding library functions,
1527 try not using nm extraction. You can do this from the command line
1530 sh Configure -Uusenm
1532 or by answering the nm extraction question interactively.
1533 If you have previously run Configure, you should not reuse your old
1536 =item umask not found
1538 If the build processes encounters errors relating to umask(), the problem
1539 is probably that Configure couldn't find your umask() system call.
1540 Check your config.sh. You should have d_umask='define'. If you don't,
1541 this is probably the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above. Also,
1542 try reading the hints file for your system for further information.
1546 If you run into problems with vsprintf in compiling util.c, the
1547 problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
1548 version of vsprintf(). Check whether your system has vprintf().
1549 (Virtually all modern Unix systems do.) Then, check the variable
1550 d_vprintf in config.sh. If your system has vprintf, it should be:
1554 If Configure guessed wrong, it is likely that Configure guessed wrong
1555 on a number of other common functions too. This is probably
1556 the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
1560 If you run into problems relating to do_aspawn or do_spawn, the
1561 problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
1562 fork() function. Follow the procedure in the previous item
1563 on L<"nm extraction">.
1565 =item __inet_* errors
1567 If you receive unresolved symbol errors during Perl build and/or test
1568 referring to __inet_* symbols, check to see whether BIND 8.1 is
1569 installed. It installs a /usr/local/include/arpa/inet.h that refers to
1570 these symbols. Versions of BIND later than 8.1 do not install inet.h
1571 in that location and avoid the errors. You should probably update to a
1572 newer version of BIND (and remove the files the old one left behind).
1573 If you can't, you can either link with the updated resolver library provided
1574 with BIND 8.1 or rename /usr/local/bin/arpa/inet.h during the Perl build and
1575 test process to avoid the problem.
1577 =item .*_r() prototype NOT found
1579 On a related note, if you see a bunch of complaints like the above about
1580 reentrant functions -- specifically networking-related ones -- being present
1581 but without prototypes available, check to see if BIND 8.1 (or possibly
1582 other BIND 8 versions) is (or has been) installed. They install
1583 header files such as netdb.h into places such as /usr/local/include (or into
1584 another directory as specified at build/install time), at least optionally.
1585 Remove them or put them in someplace that isn't in the C preprocessor's
1586 header file include search path (determined by -I options plus defaults,
1587 normally /usr/include).
1589 =item #error "No DATAMODEL_NATIVE specified"
1591 This is a common error when trying to build perl on Solaris 2.6 with a
1592 gcc installation from Solaris 2.5 or 2.5.1. The Solaris header files
1593 changed, so you need to update your gcc installation. You can either
1594 rerun the fixincludes script from gcc or take the opportunity to
1595 update your gcc installation.
1599 If you can't compile successfully, try turning off your compiler's
1600 optimizer. Edit config.sh and change the line
1608 then propagate your changes with B<sh Configure -S> and rebuild
1609 with B<make depend; make>.
1611 =item Missing functions and Undefined symbols
1613 If the build of miniperl fails with a long list of missing functions or
1614 undefined symbols, check the libs variable in the config.sh file. It
1615 should look something like
1617 libs='-lsocket -lnsl -ldl -lm -lc'
1619 The exact libraries will vary from system to system, but you typically
1620 need to include at least the math library -lm. Normally, Configure
1621 will suggest the correct defaults. If the libs variable is empty, you
1622 need to start all over again. Run
1626 and start from the very beginning. This time, unless you are sure of
1627 what you are doing, accept the default list of libraries suggested by
1630 If the libs variable is missing -lm, there is a chance that libm.so.1
1631 is available, but the required (symbolic) link to libm.so is missing.
1632 (same could be the case for other libraries like libcrypt.so). You
1633 should check your installation for packages that create that link, and
1634 if no package is installed that supplies that link or you cannot install
1635 them, make the symbolic link yourself e.g.:
1637 $ rpm -qf /usr/lib64/libm.so
1638 glibc-devel-2.15-22.17.1.x86_64
1639 $ ls -lgo /usr/lib64/libm.so
1640 lrwxrwxrwx 1 16 Jan 7 2013 /usr/lib64/libm.so -> /lib64/libm.so.6
1644 $ sudo ln -s /lib64/libm.so.6 /lib64/libm.so
1646 If the libs variable looks correct, you might have the
1647 L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
1649 If you still have missing routines or undefined symbols, you probably
1650 need to add some library or other, make a symbolic link like described
1651 above, or you need to undefine some feature that Configure thought was
1652 there but is defective or incomplete. If you used a hint file, see if
1653 it has any relevant advice. You can also look through through config.h
1654 for likely suspects.
1658 Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files (such as
1659 toke.c) without some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or
1660 allocate larger internal tables. You can customize the switches for
1661 each file in cflags.SH. It's okay to insert rules for specific files into
1662 makefile since a default rule only takes effect in the absence of a
1665 =item Missing dbmclose
1667 SCO prior to 3.2.4 may be missing dbmclose(). An upgrade to 3.2.4
1668 that includes libdbm.nfs (which includes dbmclose()) may be available.
1670 =item error: too few arguments to function 'dbmclose'
1672 Building ODBM_File on some (Open)SUSE distributions might run into this
1673 error, as the header file is broken. There are two ways to deal with this
1675 1. Disable the use of ODBM_FILE
1677 Configure ... -Dnoextensions=ODBM_File
1679 2. Fix the header file, somewhat like this:
1681 --- a/usr/include/dbm.h 2010-03-24 08:54:59.000000000 +0100
1682 +++ b/usr/include/dbm.h 2010-03-24 08:55:15.000000000 +0100
1683 @@ -59,4 +59,4 @@ extern datum firstkey __P((void));
1685 extern datum nextkey __P((datum key));
1687 -extern int dbmclose __P((DBM *));
1688 +extern int dbmclose __P((void));
1690 =item Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lsomething
1692 If you see such a message during the building of an extension, but
1693 the extension passes its tests anyway (see L<"make test"> below),
1694 then don't worry about the warning message. The extension
1695 Makefile.PL goes looking for various libraries needed on various
1696 systems; few systems will need all the possible libraries listed.
1697 Most users will see warnings for the ones they don't have. The
1698 phrase 'probably harmless' is intended to reassure you that nothing
1699 unusual is happening, and the build process is continuing.
1701 On the other hand, if you are building GDBM_File and you get the
1704 Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lgdbm
1706 then it's likely you're going to run into trouble somewhere along
1707 the line, since it's hard to see how you can use the GDBM_File
1708 extension without the -lgdbm library.
1710 It is true that, in principle, Configure could have figured all of
1711 this out, but Configure and the extension building process are not
1712 quite that tightly coordinated.
1714 =item sh: ar: not found
1716 This is a message from your shell telling you that the command 'ar'
1717 was not found. You need to check your PATH environment variable to
1718 make sure that it includes the directory with the 'ar' command. This
1719 is a common problem on Solaris, where 'ar' is in the /usr/ccs/bin
1722 =item db-recno failure on tests 51, 53 and 55
1724 Old versions of the DB library (including the DB library which comes
1725 with FreeBSD 2.1) had broken handling of recno databases with modified
1726 bval settings. Upgrade your DB library or OS.
1728 =item Bad arg length for semctl, is XX, should be ZZZ
1730 If you get this error message from the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem test, your System
1731 V IPC may be broken. The XX typically is 20, and that is what ZZZ
1732 also should be. Consider upgrading your OS, or reconfiguring your OS
1733 to include the System V semaphores.
1735 =item ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem........semget: No space left on device
1737 Either your account or the whole system has run out of semaphores. Or
1738 both. Either list the semaphores with "ipcs" and remove the unneeded
1739 ones (which ones these are depends on your system and applications)
1740 with "ipcrm -s SEMAPHORE_ID_HERE" or configure more semaphores to your
1745 If you mix GNU binutils (nm, ld, ar) with equivalent vendor-supplied
1746 tools you may be in for some trouble. For example creating archives
1747 with an old GNU 'ar' and then using a new current vendor-supplied 'ld'
1748 may lead into linking problems. Either recompile your GNU binutils
1749 under your current operating system release, or modify your PATH not
1750 to include the GNU utils before running Configure, or specify the
1751 vendor-supplied utilities explicitly to Configure, for example by
1752 Configure -Dar=/bin/ar.
1754 =item THIS PACKAGE SEEMS TO BE INCOMPLETE
1756 The F<Configure> program has not been able to find all the files which
1757 make up the complete Perl distribution. You may have a damaged source
1758 archive file (in which case you may also have seen messages such as
1759 C<gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file> and C<tar: Unexpected EOF on
1760 archive file>), or you may have obtained a structurally-sound but
1761 incomplete archive. In either case, try downloading again from the
1762 official site named at the start of this document. If you do find
1763 that any site is carrying a corrupted or incomplete source code
1764 archive, please report it to the site's maintainer.
1766 =item invalid token: ##
1768 You are using a non-ANSI-compliant C compiler. To compile Perl, you
1769 need to use a compiler that supports ANSI C. If there is a README
1770 file for your system, it may have further details on your compiler
1775 Some additional things that have been reported:
1777 Genix may need to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS.
1779 NCR Tower 32 (OS 2.01.01) may need -W2,-Sl,2000 and #undef MKDIR.
1781 UTS may need one or more of -K or -g, and #undef LSTAT.
1783 FreeBSD can fail the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem.t test if SysV IPC has not been
1784 configured in the kernel. Perl tries to detect this, though, and
1785 you will get a message telling you what to do.
1787 Building Perl on a system that has also BIND (headers and libraries)
1788 installed may run into troubles because BIND installs its own netdb.h
1789 and socket.h, which may not agree with the operating system's ideas of
1790 the same files. Similarly, including -lbind may conflict with libc's
1791 view of the world. You may have to tweak -Dlocincpth and -Dloclibpth
1796 =head2 Cross-compilation
1798 Perl can be cross-compiled. It is just not trivial, cross-compilation
1799 rarely is. Perl is routinely cross-compiled for several platforms: as of
1800 January 2014, these include Android, Blackberry 10, PocketPC aka
1801 WinCE, ARM Linux, and Solaris. Previous versions of
1802 Perl also provided support for Open Zaurus, Symbian, and
1803 the IBM OS/400, but it's unknown if those ports are still functional.
1804 These platforms are known as the B<target> platforms, while the systems where the compilation takes place are the B<host> platforms.
1806 What makes the situation difficult is that first of all,
1807 cross-compilation environments vary significantly in how they are set
1808 up and used, and secondly because the primary way of configuring Perl
1809 (using the rather large Unix-tool-dependent Configure script) is not
1810 awfully well suited for cross-compilation. However, starting from
1811 version 5.18.0, the Configure script also knows two ways of supporting
1812 cross-compilation, so please keep reading.
1814 See the following files for more information about compiling Perl for
1815 the particular platforms:
1819 =item WinCE/PocketPC
1821 L<README.ce or perlce|perlce>
1825 L<"Cross-compilation" in README.android or perlandroid|perlandroid/Cross-compilation>
1829 L<"Cross-compilation" in README.qnx or perlqnx|perlqnx/Cross-compilation>
1833 L<"CROSS-COMPILATION" in README.solaris or perlsolaris|perlsolaris/CROSS-COMPILATION>
1837 This document; See below.
1841 Packaging and transferring either the core Perl modules or CPAN
1842 modules to the target platform is also left up to the each
1843 cross-compilation environment. Often the cross-compilation target
1844 platforms are somewhat limited in diskspace: see the section
1845 L<Minimizing the Perl installation> to learn more of the minimal set
1846 of files required for a functional Perl installation.
1848 For some cross-compilation environments the Configure option
1849 C<-Dinstallprefix=...> might be handy, see L<Changing the installation
1852 About the cross-compilation support of Configure: There's two forms.
1853 The more common one requires some way of transferring and running executables
1854 in the target system, such as an ssh connection; this is the
1855 C<./Configure -Dusecrosscompile -Dtargethost=...> route. The second method
1856 doesn't need access to the target system, but requires you to provide
1857 a config.sh, and and a canned Makefile; the rest of this section describes
1860 This cross-compilation setup of Configure has successfully been used in
1861 a wide variety of setups, such as a 64-bit OS X host for an Android ARM target, or
1862 an amd64 Linux host targeting x86 Solaris, or even Windows.
1864 To run Configure in cross-compilation mode the basic switch that
1865 has to be used is C<-Dusecrosscompile>:
1867 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile -D...
1869 This will make the cpp symbol USE_CROSS_COMPILE and the %Config
1870 symbol C<usecrosscompile> available.
1872 During the Configure and build, certain helper scripts will be created
1873 into the Cross/ subdirectory. The scripts are used to execute a
1874 cross-compiled executable, and to transfer files to and from the
1875 target host. The execution scripts are named F<run-*> and the
1876 transfer scripts F<to-*> and F<from-*>. The part after the dash is
1877 the method to use for remote execution and transfer: by default the
1878 methods are B<ssh> and B<scp>, thus making the scripts F<run-ssh>,
1879 F<to-scp>, and F<from-scp>.
1881 To configure the scripts for a target host and a directory (in which
1882 the execution will happen and which is to and from where the transfer
1883 happens), supply Configure with
1885 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st -Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir
1887 The targethost is what e.g. ssh will use as the hostname, the targetdir
1888 must exist (the scripts won't create it), the targetdir defaults to /tmp.
1889 You can also specify a username to use for ssh/rsh logins
1893 but in case you don't, "root" will be used. Similarly, you can specify
1894 a non-standard (i.e. not 22) port for the connection, if applicable, through
1898 If the name of C<cc> has the usual GNU C semantics for cross
1899 compilers, that is, CPU-OS-gcc, the target architecture (C<targetarch>),
1900 plus names of the C<ar>, C<nm>, and C<ranlib> will also be automatically
1901 chosen to be CPU-OS-ar and so on.
1902 (The C<ld> requires more thought and will be chosen later by Configure
1903 as appropriate). This will also aid in guessing the proper
1904 operating system name for the target, which has other repercussions, like
1905 better defaults and possibly critical fixes for the platform. If Configure
1906 isn't guessing the OS name properly, you may need to either add a hint file
1907 redirecting Configure's guess, or modify Configure to make the correct choice.
1909 If your compiler doesn't follow that convention, you will also need to
1910 specify which target environment to use, as well as C<ar> and friends:
1912 -Dtargetarch=arm-linux
1916 Additionally, a cross-compilation toolchain will usually install it's own
1917 logical system root somewhere -- that is, it'll create a directory somewhere
1918 which includes subdirectories like 'include' or 'lib'. For example, you
1919 may end up with C</skiff/local/arm-linux>, where
1920 C</skiff/local/arm-linux/bin> holds the binaries for cross-compilation,
1921 C</skiff/local/arm-linux/include> has the headers, and
1922 C</skiff/local/arm-linux/lib> has the library files.
1923 If this is the case, and you are using a compiler that understands
1924 C<--sysroot>, like gcc or clang, you'll want to specify the
1925 C<-Dsysroot> option for Configure:
1927 -Dsysroot=/skiff/local/arm-linux
1929 However, if your don't have a suitable directory to pass to C<-Dsysroot>,
1930 you will also need to specify which target environment to use:
1932 -Dusrinc=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
1933 -Dincpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
1934 -Dlibpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/lib
1936 In addition to the default execution/transfer methods you can also
1937 choose B<rsh> for execution, and B<rcp> or B<cp> for transfer,
1940 -Dtargetrun=rsh -Dtargetto=rcp -Dtargetfrom=cp
1942 Putting it all together:
1944 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1945 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1946 -Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir \
1948 -Dtargetarch=arm-linux \
1949 -Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
1950 -Dsysroot=/skiff/local/arm-linux \
1953 or if you are happy with the defaults:
1955 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1956 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1957 -Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
1960 Another example where the cross-compiler has been installed under
1961 F</usr/local/arm/2.95.5>:
1963 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1964 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1965 -Dcc=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5/bin/arm-linux-gcc \
1966 -Dsysroot=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5
1968 There is also a C<targetenv> option for Configure which can be used
1969 to modify the environment of the target just before testing begins
1970 during 'make test'. For example, if the target system has a nonstandard
1971 /tmp location, you could do this:
1973 -Dtargetenv="export TMPDIR=/other/tmp;"
1975 If you are planning on cross-compiling to several platforms, or some other
1976 thing that would involve running Configure several times, there are two
1977 options that can be used to speed things up considerably.
1978 As a bit of background, when you
1979 call Configure with C<-Dusecrosscompile>, it begins by actually partially
1980 building a miniperl on the host machine, as well as the generate_uudmap
1981 binary, and we end up using that during the build.
1982 So instead of building that new perl every single time, you can build it just
1983 once in a separate directory, and then pass the resulting binaries to
1984 Configure like this:
1986 -Dhostperl=/path/to/second/build/dir/miniperl
1987 -Dhostgenerate=/path/to/second/build/dir/generate_uudmap
1989 Much less commonly, if you are cross-compiling from an ASCII host to an
1990 EBCDIC target, or vise versa, you'll have to pass C<-Uhostgenerate> to
1991 Configure, to signify that you want to build a generate_uudmap binary
1992 that, during make, will be run on the target system.
1996 This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made. If
1997 'make test' doesn't say "All tests successful" then something went
2000 Note that you can't run the tests in background if this disables
2001 opening of /dev/tty. You can use 'make test-notty' in that case but
2002 a few tty tests will be skipped.
2004 =head2 What if make test doesn't work?
2006 If make test bombs out, just cd to the t directory and run ./TEST
2007 by hand to see if it makes any difference.
2009 One way to get more detailed information about failed tests and
2010 individual subtests is to run the harness from the t directory:
2012 cd t ; ./perl harness <list of tests>
2014 (this assumes that most basic tests succeed, since harness uses
2015 complicated constructs). If no list of tests is provided, harness
2018 If individual tests fail, you can often run them by hand (from the main
2019 perl directory), e.g.,
2021 ./perl -MTestInit t/op/groups.t
2023 You should also read the individual tests to see if there are any helpful
2024 comments that apply to your system. You may also need to setup your
2025 shared library path if you get errors like:
2027 /sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
2029 The file t/README in the t subdirectory contains more information about
2030 running and modifying tests.
2032 See L</"Building a shared Perl library"> earlier in this document.
2038 Note: One possible reason for errors is that some external programs
2039 may be broken due to the combination of your environment and the way
2040 'make test' exercises them. For example, this may happen if you have
2041 one or more of these environment variables set: LC_ALL LC_CTYPE
2042 LC_COLLATE LANG. In some versions of UNIX, the non-English locales
2043 are known to cause programs to exhibit mysterious errors.
2045 If you have any of the above environment variables set, please try
2051 LC_ALL=C;export LC_ALL
2053 for Bourne or Korn shell) from the command line and then retry
2054 make test. If the tests then succeed, you may have a broken program that
2055 is confusing the testing. Please run the troublesome test by hand as
2056 shown above and see whether you can locate the program. Look for
2057 things like: exec, `backquoted command`, system, open("|...") or
2058 open("...|"). All these mean that Perl is trying to run some
2061 =item Timing problems
2063 Several tests in the test suite check timing functions, such as
2064 sleep(), and see if they return in a reasonable amount of time.
2065 If your system is quite busy and doesn't respond quickly enough,
2066 these tests might fail. If possible, try running the tests again
2067 with the system under a lighter load. These timing-sensitive
2068 and load-sensitive tests include F<t/op/alarm.t>,
2069 F<ext/Time-HiRes/t/HiRes.t>, F<ext/threads-shared/t/waithires.t>,
2070 F<ext/threads-shared/t/stress.t>, F<lib/Benchmark.t>,
2071 F<lib/Memoize/t/expmod_t.t>, and F<lib/Memoize/t/speed.t>.
2073 You might also experience some failures in F<t/op/stat.t> if you build
2074 perl on an NFS filesystem, if the remote clock and the system clock are
2079 On some systems, particularly those with smaller amounts of RAM, some
2080 of the tests in t/op/pat.t may fail with an "Out of memory" message.
2081 For example, on my SparcStation IPC with 12 MB of RAM, in perl5.5.670,
2082 test 85 will fail if run under either t/TEST or t/harness.
2084 Try stopping other jobs on the system and then running the test by itself:
2086 ./perl -MTestInit t/op/pat.t
2088 to see if you have any better luck. If your perl still fails this
2089 test, it does not necessarily mean you have a broken perl. This test
2090 tries to exercise the regular expression subsystem quite thoroughly,
2091 and may well be far more demanding than your normal usage.
2093 =item libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file
2095 This message has been reported on gcc-3.2.3 and earlier installed with
2096 a non-standard prefix. Setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable
2097 (or equivalent) to include gcc's lib/ directory with the libgcc_s.so.1
2098 shared library should fix the problem.
2100 =item Failures from lib/File/Temp/t/security saying "system possibly insecure"
2102 First, such warnings are not necessarily serious or indicative of a
2103 real security threat. That being said, they bear investigating.
2105 Note that each of the tests is run twice. The first time is in the
2106 directory returned by File::Spec->tmpdir() (often /tmp on Unix
2107 systems), and the second time in the directory from which the test was
2108 run (usually the 't' directory, if the test was run as part of 'make
2111 The tests may fail for the following reasons:
2113 (1) If the directory the tests are being run in is owned by somebody
2114 other than the user running the tests, or by root (uid 0).
2116 This failure can happen if the Perl source code distribution is
2117 unpacked in such a way that the user IDs in the distribution package
2118 are used as-is. Some tar programs do this.
2120 (2) If the directory the tests are being run in is writable by group or
2121 by others, and there is no sticky bit set for the directory. (With
2122 UNIX/POSIX semantics, write access to a directory means the right to
2123 add or remove files in that directory. The 'sticky bit' is a feature
2124 used in some UNIXes to give extra protection to files: if the bit is
2125 set for a directory, no one but the owner (or root) can remove that
2126 file even if the permissions would otherwise allow file removal by
2129 This failure may or may not be a real problem: it depends on the
2130 permissions policy used on this particular system. This failure can
2131 also happen if the system either doesn't support the sticky bit (this
2132 is the case with many non-UNIX platforms: in principle File::Temp
2133 should know about these platforms and skip the tests), or if the system
2134 supports the sticky bit but for some reason or reasons it is not being
2135 used. This is, for example, the case with HP-UX: as of HP-UX release
2136 11.00, the sticky bit is very much supported, but HP-UX doesn't use it
2137 on its /tmp directory as shipped. Also, as with the permissions, some
2138 local policy might dictate that the stickiness is not used.
2140 (3) If the system supports the POSIX 'chown giveaway' feature and if
2141 any of the parent directories of the temporary file back to the root
2142 directory are 'unsafe', using the definitions given above in (1) and
2143 (2). For Unix systems, this is usually not an issue if you are
2144 building on a local disk. See the documentation for the File::Temp
2145 module for more information about 'chown giveaway'.
2147 See the documentation for the File::Temp module for more information
2148 about the various security aspects of temporary files.
2152 The core distribution can now run its regression tests in parallel on
2153 Unix-like platforms. Instead of running C<make test>, set C<TEST_JOBS> in
2154 your environment to the number of tests to run in parallel, and run
2155 C<make test_harness>. On a Bourne-like shell, this can be done as
2157 TEST_JOBS=3 make test_harness # Run 3 tests in parallel
2159 An environment variable is used, rather than parallel make itself, because
2160 L<TAP::Harness> needs to be able to schedule individual non-conflicting test
2161 scripts itself, and there is no standard interface to C<make> utilities to
2162 interact with their job schedulers.
2166 This will put perl into the public directory you specified to
2167 Configure; by default this is /usr/local/bin. It will also try
2168 to put the man pages in a reasonable place. It will not nroff the man
2169 pages, however. You may need to be root to run B<make install>. If you
2170 are not root, you must still have permission to install into the directories
2171 in question and you should ignore any messages about chown not working.
2173 If "make install" just says "'install' is up to date" or something
2174 similar, you may be on a case-insensitive filesystems such as Mac's HFS+,
2175 and you should say "make install-all". (This confusion is brought to you
2176 by the Perl distribution having a file called INSTALL.)
2178 =head2 Installing perl under different names
2180 If you want to install perl under a name other than "perl" (for example,
2181 when installing perl with special features enabled, such as debugging),
2182 indicate the alternate name on the "make install" line, such as:
2184 make install PERLNAME=myperl
2186 You can separately change the base used for versioned names (like
2187 "perl5.8.9") by setting PERLNAME_VERBASE, like
2189 make install PERLNAME=perl5 PERLNAME_VERBASE=perl
2191 This can be useful if you have to install perl as "perl5" (e.g. to
2192 avoid conflicts with an ancient version in /usr/bin supplied by your vendor).
2193 Without this the versioned binary would be called "perl55.8.8".
2195 =head2 Installing perl under a different directory
2197 You can install perl under a different destination directory by using
2198 the DESTDIR variable during C<make install>, with a command like
2200 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/perl5
2202 DESTDIR is automatically prepended to all the installation paths. See
2203 the example in L<"DESTDIR"> above.
2205 =head2 Installed files
2207 If you want to see exactly what will happen without installing
2208 anything, you can run
2210 ./perl installperl -n
2211 ./perl installman -n
2213 make install will install the following:
2218 perl5.n.n where 5.n.n is the current release number. This
2219 will be a link to perl.
2220 a2p awk-to-perl translator.
2224 cppstdin This is used by the deprecated switch perl -P,
2225 if your cc -E can't read from stdin.
2226 c2ph, pstruct Scripts for handling C structures in header
2228 corelist Shows versions of modules that come with
2231 cpan The CPAN shell.
2232 enc2xs Encoding module generator.
2233 find2perl find-to-perl translator.
2234 h2ph Extract constants and simple macros from C
2236 h2xs Converts C .h header files to Perl extensions.
2237 instmodsh A shell to examine installed modules.
2238 libnetcfg Configure libnet.
2239 perlbug Tool to report bugs in Perl.
2240 perldoc Tool to read perl's pod documentation.
2241 perlivp Perl Installation Verification Procedure.
2242 piconv A Perl implementation of the encoding conversion
2244 pl2pm Convert Perl 4 .pl files to Perl 5 .pm modules.
2245 pod2html, Converters from perl's pod documentation format
2249 podchecker POD syntax checker.
2250 podselect Prints sections of POD documentation.
2251 prove A command-line tool for running tests.
2252 psed A Perl implementation of sed.
2253 ptar A Perl implementation of tar.
2254 ptardiff A diff for tar archives.
2255 ptargrep A grep for tar archives.
2256 s2p sed-to-perl translator.
2257 shasum A tool to print or check SHA checksums.
2258 splain Describe Perl warnings and errors.
2259 xsubpp Compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.
2260 zipdetails display the internal structure of zip files
2264 in $privlib and $archlib specified to
2265 Configure, usually under /usr/local/lib/perl5/.
2269 man pages in $man1dir, usually /usr/local/man/man1.
2271 pages in $man3dir, usually /usr/local/man/man3.
2272 pod/*.pod in $privlib/pod/.
2274 installperl will also create the directories listed above
2275 in L<"Installation Directories">.
2277 Perl's *.h header files and the libperl library are also installed
2278 under $archlib so that any user may later build new modules, run the
2279 optional Perl compiler, or embed the perl interpreter into another
2280 program even if the Perl source is no longer available.
2282 =head2 Installing only version-specific parts
2284 Sometimes you only want to install the version-specific parts of the perl
2285 installation. For example, you may wish to install a newer version of
2286 perl alongside an already installed production version without
2287 disabling installation of new modules for the production version.
2288 To only install the version-specific parts of the perl installation, run
2290 Configure -Dversiononly
2292 or answer 'y' to the appropriate Configure prompt. Alternatively,
2293 you can just manually run
2295 ./perl installperl -v
2297 and skip installman altogether.
2299 See also L<"Maintaining completely separate versions"> for another
2302 =head1 cd /usr/include; h2ph *.h sys/*.h
2304 Some perl scripts need to be able to obtain information from the
2305 system header files. This command will convert the most commonly used
2306 header files in /usr/include into files that can be easily interpreted
2307 by perl. These files will be placed in the architecture-dependent
2308 library ($archlib) directory you specified to Configure.
2310 Note: Due to differences in the C and perl languages, the conversion
2311 of the header files is not perfect. You will probably have to
2312 hand-edit some of the converted files to get them to parse correctly.
2313 For example, h2ph breaks spectacularly on type casting and certain
2316 =head1 installhtml --help
2318 Some sites may wish to make perl documentation available in HTML
2319 format. The installhtml utility can be used to convert pod
2320 documentation into linked HTML files and install them.
2322 Currently, the supplied ./installhtml script does not make use of the
2323 html Configure variables. This should be fixed in a future release.
2325 The following command-line is an example of one used to convert
2330 --podpath=lib:ext:pod:vms \
2332 --htmldir=/perl/nmanual \
2333 --htmlroot=/perl/nmanual \
2334 --splithead=pod/perlipc \
2335 --splititem=pod/perlfunc \
2338 See the documentation in installhtml for more details. It can take
2339 many minutes to execute a large installation and you should expect to
2340 see warnings like "no title", "unexpected directive" and "cannot
2341 resolve" as the files are processed. We are aware of these problems
2342 (and would welcome patches for them).
2344 You may find it helpful to run installhtml twice. That should reduce
2345 the number of "cannot resolve" warnings.
2347 =head1 cd pod && make tex && (process the latex files)
2349 Some sites may also wish to make the documentation in the pod/ directory
2350 available in TeX format. Type
2352 (cd pod && make tex && <process the latex files>)
2354 =head1 Starting all over again
2356 If you wish to rebuild perl from the same build directory, you should
2357 clean it out with the command
2365 The only difference between the two is that make distclean also removes
2366 your old config.sh and Policy.sh files. (A plain 'make clean' will not
2367 delete the makefiles used for rebuilding perl, and will also not delete
2368 a number of library and utility files extracted during the build process.)
2370 If you are upgrading from a previous version of perl, or if you
2371 change systems or compilers or make other significant changes, or if
2372 you are experiencing difficulties building perl, you should not reuse
2375 If your reason to reuse your old config.sh is to save your particular
2376 installation choices, then you can probably achieve the same effect by
2377 using the Policy.sh file. See the section on L<"Site-wide Policy
2380 =head1 Reporting Problems
2382 Wherever possible please use the perlbug tool supplied with this Perl
2383 to report problems, as it automatically includes summary configuration
2384 information about your perl, which may help us track down problems far
2385 more quickly. But first you should read the advice in this file,
2386 carefully re-read the error message and check the relevant manual pages
2387 on your system, as these may help you find an immediate solution. If
2388 you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug, you can send a
2389 message describing the problem to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup to
2392 The perlbug tool is installed along with perl, so after you have
2393 completed C<make install> it should be possible to run it with plain
2394 C<perlbug>. If the install fails, or you want to report problems with
2395 C<make test> without installing perl, then you can use C<make nok> to
2396 run perlbug to report the problem, or run it by hand from this source
2397 directory with C<./perl -Ilib utils/perlbug>
2399 If the build fails too early to run perlbug uninstalled, then please
2400 B<run> the C<./myconfig> shell script, and mail its output along with
2401 an accurate description of your problem to perlbug@perl.org
2403 If Configure itself fails, and does not generate a config.sh file
2404 (needed to run C<./myconfig>), then please mail perlbug@perl.org the
2405 description of how Configure fails along with details of your system
2406 -- for example the output from running C<uname -a>
2408 Please try to make your message brief but clear. Brief, clear bug
2409 reports tend to get answered more quickly. Please don't worry if your
2410 written English is not great -- what matters is how well you describe
2411 the important technical details of the problem you have encountered,
2412 not whether your grammar and spelling is flawless.
2414 Trim out unnecessary information. Do not include large files (such as
2415 config.sh or a complete Configure or make log) unless absolutely
2416 necessary. Do not include a complete transcript of your build
2417 session. Just include the failing commands, the relevant error
2418 messages, and whatever preceding commands are necessary to give the
2419 appropriate context. Plain text should usually be sufficient -- fancy
2420 attachments or encodings may actually reduce the number of people who
2421 read your message. Your message will get relayed to over 400
2422 subscribers around the world so please try to keep it brief but clear.
2424 If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
2425 inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send
2426 it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription
2427 unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who be able
2428 to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help
2429 co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all
2430 platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this address for security
2431 issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
2433 If you are unsure what makes a good bug report please read "How to
2434 report Bugs Effectively" by Simon Tatham:
2435 http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
2437 =head1 Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5
2439 Perl 5.21.5 is not binary compatible with earlier versions of Perl.
2440 In other words, you will have to recompile your XS modules.
2442 In general, you can usually safely upgrade from one version of Perl (e.g.
2443 5.X.Y) to another similar minor version (e.g. 5.X.(Y+1))) without
2444 re-compiling all of your extensions. You can also safely leave the old
2445 version around in case the new version causes you problems for some reason.
2447 Usually, most extensions will probably not need to be recompiled to be
2448 used with a newer version of Perl. Here is how it is supposed to work.
2449 (These examples assume you accept all the Configure defaults.)
2451 Suppose you already have version 5.8.7 installed. The directories
2452 searched by 5.8.7 are typically like:
2454 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7/$archname
2455 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7
2456 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/$archname
2457 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2459 Now, suppose you install version 5.8.8. The directories
2460 searched by version 5.8.8 will be:
2462 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/$archname
2463 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8
2464 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/$archname
2465 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
2467 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/$archname
2468 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2469 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
2471 Notice the last three entries -- Perl understands the default structure
2472 of the $sitelib directories and will look back in older, compatible
2473 directories. This way, modules installed under 5.8.7 will continue
2474 to be usable by 5.8.7 but will also accessible to 5.8.8. Further,
2475 suppose that you upgrade a module to one which requires features
2476 present only in 5.8.8. That new module will get installed into
2477 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 and will be available to 5.8.8,
2478 but will not interfere with the 5.8.7 version.
2480 The last entry, /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/, is there so that
2481 5.6.0 and above will look for 5.004-era pure perl modules.
2483 Lastly, suppose you now install 5.10.0, which is not binary compatible
2484 with 5.8.x. The directories searched by 5.10.0 (if you don't change the
2485 Configure defaults) will be:
2487 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/$archname
2488 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
2489 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/$archname
2490 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0
2492 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
2494 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2496 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
2498 Note that the earlier $archname entries are now gone, but pure perl
2499 modules from earlier versions will still be found.
2501 This way, you can choose to share compatible extensions, but also upgrade
2502 to a newer version of an extension that may be incompatible with earlier
2503 versions, without breaking the earlier versions' installations.
2505 =head2 Maintaining completely separate versions
2507 Many users prefer to keep all versions of perl in completely
2508 separate directories. This guarantees that an update to one version
2509 won't interfere with another version. (The defaults guarantee this for
2510 libraries after 5.6.0, but not for executables. TODO?) One convenient
2511 way to do this is by using a separate prefix for each version, such as
2513 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl5.21.5
2515 and adding /opt/perl5.21.5/bin to the shell PATH variable. Such users
2516 may also wish to add a symbolic link /usr/local/bin/perl so that
2517 scripts can still start with #!/usr/local/bin/perl.
2519 Others might share a common directory for maintenance sub-versions
2520 (e.g. 5.10 for all 5.10.x versions), but change directory with
2523 If you are installing a development subversion, you probably ought to
2524 seriously consider using a separate directory, since development
2525 subversions may not have all the compatibility wrinkles ironed out
2528 =head2 Upgrading from 5.21.3 or earlier
2530 B<Perl 5.21.5 may not be binary compatible with Perl 5.21.4 or
2531 earlier Perl releases.> Perl modules having binary parts
2532 (meaning that a C compiler is used) will have to be recompiled to be
2533 used with 5.21.5. If you find you do need to rebuild an extension with
2534 5.21.5, you may safely do so without disturbing the older
2535 installations. (See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5">
2538 See your installed copy of the perllocal.pod file for a (possibly
2539 incomplete) list of locally installed modules. Note that you want
2540 perllocal.pod, not perllocale.pod, for installed module information.
2542 =head1 Minimizing the Perl installation
2544 The following section is meant for people worrying about squeezing the
2545 Perl installation into minimal systems (for example when installing
2546 operating systems, or in really small filesystems).
2548 Leaving out as many extensions as possible is an obvious way:
2549 Encode, with its big conversion tables, consumes a lot of
2550 space. On the other hand, you cannot throw away everything. The
2551 Fcntl module is pretty essential. If you need to do network
2552 programming, you'll appreciate the Socket module, and so forth: it all
2553 depends on what do you need to do.
2555 In the following we offer two different slimmed down installation
2556 recipes. They are informative, not normative: the choice of files
2557 depends on what you need.
2559 Firstly, the bare minimum to run this script
2563 foreach my $f (</*>) {
2567 in Linux with perl-5.21.5 is as follows (under $Config{prefix}):
2570 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/strict.pm
2571 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/warnings.pm
2572 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/i686-linux/File/Glob.pm
2573 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/feature.pm
2574 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/XSLoader.pm
2575 ./lib/perl5/5.21.5/i686-linux/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
2577 Secondly, for perl-5.10.1, the Debian perl-base package contains 591 files,
2578 (of which 510 are for lib/unicore) totaling about 3.5MB in its i386 version.
2579 Omitting the lib/unicore/* files for brevity, the remaining files are:
2583 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config.pm
2584 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config_git.pl
2585 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config_heavy.pl
2586 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Cwd.pm
2587 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/DynaLoader.pm
2588 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Errno.pm
2589 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Fcntl.pm
2590 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/File/Glob.pm
2591 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Hash/Util.pm
2592 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO.pm
2593 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/File.pm
2594 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Handle.pm
2595 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Pipe.pm
2596 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Seekable.pm
2597 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Select.pm
2598 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket.pm
2599 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket/INET.pm
2600 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket/UNIX.pm
2601 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/List/Util.pm
2602 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/POSIX.pm
2603 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Scalar/Util.pm
2604 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Socket.pm
2605 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/XSLoader.pm
2606 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Cwd/Cwd.so
2607 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/autosplit.ix
2608 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_expandspec.al
2609 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_find_symbol_anywhere.al
2610 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_findfile.al
2611 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Fcntl/Fcntl.so
2612 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
2613 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Hash/Util/Util.so
2614 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/IO/IO.so
2615 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/List/Util/Util.so
2616 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/POSIX.so
2617 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/autosplit.ix
2618 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/load_imports.al
2619 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Socket/Socket.so
2620 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/lib.pm
2621 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/re.pm
2622 /usr/share/doc/perl/AUTHORS.gz
2623 /usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation
2624 /usr/share/doc/perl/README.Debian
2625 /usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz
2626 /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
2627 /usr/share/lintian/overrides/perl-base
2628 /usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz
2629 /usr/share/man/man1/perl5.10.1.1.gz
2630 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/AutoLoader.pm
2631 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Carp.pm
2632 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Carp/Heavy.pm
2633 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Exporter.pm
2634 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Exporter/Heavy.pm
2635 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/File/Spec.pm
2636 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/File/Spec/Unix.pm
2637 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/FileHandle.pm
2638 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Getopt/Long.pm
2639 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/IPC/Open2.pm
2640 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/IPC/Open3.pm
2641 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/SelectSaver.pm
2642 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Symbol.pm
2643 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/ParseWords.pm
2644 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/Tabs.pm
2645 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/Wrap.pm
2646 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Tie/Hash.pm
2647 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/attributes.pm
2648 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/base.pm
2649 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/bytes.pm
2650 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/bytes_heavy.pl
2651 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/constant.pm
2652 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/fields.pm
2653 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/integer.pm
2654 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/locale.pm
2655 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/overload.pm
2656 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/strict.pm
2657 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/unicore/*
2658 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/utf8.pm
2659 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/utf8_heavy.pl
2660 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/vars.pm
2661 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/warnings.pm
2662 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/warnings/register.pm
2664 A nice trick to find out the minimal set of Perl library files you will
2665 need to run a Perl program is
2667 perl -e 'do "prog.pl"; END { print "$_\n" for sort keys %INC }'
2669 (this will not find libraries required in runtime, unfortunately, but
2670 it's a minimal set) and if you want to find out all the files you can
2671 use something like the below
2673 strace perl -le 'do "x.pl"' 2>&1 \
2674 | perl -nle '/^open\(\"(.+?)"/ && print $1'
2676 (The 'strace' is Linux-specific, other similar utilities include 'truss'
2679 =head2 C<-DNO_MATHOMS>
2681 If you configure perl with C<-Accflags=-DNO_MATHOMS>, the functions from
2682 F<mathoms.c> will not be compiled in. Those functions are no longer used
2683 by perl itself; for source compatibility reasons, though, they weren't
2686 =head1 DOCUMENTATION
2688 Read the manual entries before running perl. The main documentation
2689 is in the pod/ subdirectory and should have been installed during the
2690 build process. Type B<man perl> to get started. Alternatively, you
2691 can type B<perldoc perl> to use the supplied perldoc script. This is
2692 sometimes useful for finding things in the library modules.
2696 Original author: Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu , borrowing very
2697 heavily from the original README by Larry Wall, with lots of helpful
2698 feedback and additions from the perl5-porters@perl.org folks.
2700 If you have problems, corrections, or questions, please see
2701 L<"Reporting Problems"> above.
2703 =head1 REDISTRIBUTION
2705 This document is part of the Perl package and may be distributed under
2706 the same terms as perl itself, with the following additional request:
2707 If you are distributing a modified version of perl (perhaps as part of
2708 a larger package) please B<do> modify these installation instructions
2709 and the contact information to match your distribution.