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).
334 You can "Configure -Dusemorebits" to turn on both the 64-bit support
335 and the long double support.
337 =head3 Algorithmic Complexity Attacks on Hashes
339 In Perls 5.8.0 and earlier it was easy to create degenerate hashes.
340 Processing such hashes would consume large amounts of CPU time,
341 enabling a "Denial of Service" attack against Perl. Such hashes may be
342 a problem for example for mod_perl sites, sites with Perl CGI scripts
343 and web services, that process data originating from external sources.
345 In Perl 5.8.1 a security feature was introduced to make it harder to
346 create such degenerate hashes. A visible side effect of this was that
347 the keys(), values(), and each() functions may return the hash elements
348 in different order between different runs of Perl even with the same
349 data. It also had unintended binary incompatibility issues with
350 certain modules compiled against Perl 5.8.0.
352 In Perl 5.8.2 an improved scheme was introduced. Hashes will return
353 elements in the same order as Perl 5.8.0 by default. On a hash by hash
354 basis, if pathological data is detected during a hash key insertion,
355 then that hash will switch to an alternative random hash seed. As
356 adding keys can always dramatically change returned hash element order,
357 existing programs will not be affected by this, unless they
358 specifically test for pre-recorded hash return order for contrived
359 data. (eg the list of keys generated by C<map {"\0"x$_} 0..15> trigger
360 randomisation) In effect the new implementation means that 5.8.1 scheme
361 is only being used on hashes which are under attack.
363 One can still revert to the old guaranteed repeatable order (and be
364 vulnerable to attack by wily crackers) by setting the environment
365 variable PERL_HASH_SEED, see L<perlrun/PERL_HASH_SEED>. Another option
366 is to add -DUSE_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT to the compilation flags (for
367 example by using C<Configure -Accflags=-DUSE_HASH_SEED_EXPLICIT>), in
368 which case one has to explicitly set the PERL_HASH_SEED environment
369 variable to enable the security feature, or by adding -DNO_HASH_SEED to
370 the compilation flags to completely disable the randomisation feature.
372 B<Perl has never guaranteed any ordering of the hash keys>, and the
373 ordering has already changed several times during the lifetime of Perl
374 5. Also, the ordering of hash keys has always been, and continues to
375 be, affected by the insertion order. Note that because of this
376 randomisation for example the Data::Dumper results will be different
377 between different runs of Perl, since Data::Dumper by default dumps
378 hashes "unordered". The use of the Data::Dumper C<Sortkeys> option is
383 Perl can be configured to be 'socksified', that is, to use the SOCKS
384 TCP/IP proxy protocol library. SOCKS is used to give applications
385 access to transport layer network proxies. Perl supports only SOCKS
386 Version 5. The corresponding Configure option is -Dusesocks.
387 You can find more about SOCKS from wikipedia at
388 L<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOCKS>.
390 =head3 Dynamic Loading
392 By default, Configure will compile perl to use dynamic loading.
393 If you want to force perl to be compiled completely
394 statically, you can either choose this when Configure prompts you or
395 you can use the Configure command line option -Uusedl.
396 With this option, you won't be able to use any new extension
397 (XS) module without recompiling perl itself.
399 =head3 Building a shared Perl library
401 Currently, for most systems, the main perl executable is built by
402 linking the "perl library" libperl.a with perlmain.o, your static
403 extensions, and various extra libraries, such as -lm.
405 On systems that support dynamic loading, it may be possible to
406 replace libperl.a with a shared libperl.so. If you anticipate building
407 several different perl binaries (e.g. by embedding libperl into
408 different programs, or by using the optional compiler extension), then
409 you might wish to build a shared libperl.so so that all your binaries
410 can share the same library.
412 The disadvantages are that there may be a significant performance
413 penalty associated with the shared libperl.so, and that the overall
414 mechanism is still rather fragile with respect to different versions
417 In terms of performance, on my test system (Solaris 2.5_x86) the perl
418 test suite took roughly 15% longer to run with the shared libperl.so.
419 Your system and typical applications may well give quite different
422 The default name for the shared library is typically something like
423 libperl.so.5.8.8 (for Perl 5.8.8), or libperl.so.588, or simply
424 libperl.so. Configure tries to guess a sensible naming convention
425 based on your C library name. Since the library gets installed in a
426 version-specific architecture-dependent directory, the exact name
427 isn't very important anyway, as long as your linker is happy.
429 You can elect to build a shared libperl by
431 sh Configure -Duseshrplib
433 To build a shared libperl, the environment variable controlling shared
434 library search (LD_LIBRARY_PATH in most systems, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for
435 NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP/Darwin, LD_LIBRARY_PATH/SHLIB_PATH
436 for HP-UX, LIBPATH for AIX, PATH for Cygwin) must be set up to include
437 the Perl build directory because that's where the shared libperl will
438 be created. Configure arranges makefile to have the correct shared
439 library search settings. You can find the name of the environment
440 variable Perl thinks works in your your system by
442 grep ldlibpthname config.sh
444 However, there are some special cases where manually setting the
445 shared library path might be required. For example, if you want to run
446 something like the following with the newly-built but not-yet-installed
449 ./perl -MTestInit t/misc/failing_test.t
453 ./perl -Ilib ~/my_mission_critical_test
455 then you need to set up the shared library path explicitly.
458 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
460 for Bourne-style shells, or
462 setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH `pwd`
464 for Csh-style shells. (This procedure may also be needed if for some
465 unexpected reason Configure fails to set up makefile correctly.) (And
466 again, it may be something other than LD_LIBRARY_PATH for you, see above.)
468 You can often recognize failures to build/use a shared libperl from error
469 messages complaining about a missing libperl.so (or libperl.sl in HP-UX),
472 18126:./miniperl: /sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
474 There is also an potential problem with the shared perl library if you
475 want to have more than one "flavor" of the same version of perl (e.g.
476 with and without -DDEBUGGING). For example, suppose you build and
477 install a standard Perl 5.10.0 with a shared library. Then, suppose you
478 try to build Perl 5.10.0 with -DDEBUGGING enabled, but everything else
479 the same, including all the installation directories. How can you
480 ensure that your newly built perl will link with your newly built
481 libperl.so.8 rather with the installed libperl.so.8? The answer is
482 that you might not be able to. The installation directory is encoded
483 in the perl binary with the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable (or
484 equivalent ld command-line option). On Solaris, you can override that
485 with LD_LIBRARY_PATH; on Linux, you can only override at runtime via
486 LD_PRELOAD, specifying the exact filename you wish to be used; and on
487 Digital Unix, you can override LD_LIBRARY_PATH by setting the
488 _RLD_ROOT environment variable to point to the perl build directory.
490 In other words, it is generally not a good idea to try to build a perl
491 with a shared library if $archlib/CORE/$libperl already exists from a
494 A good workaround is to specify a different directory for the
495 architecture-dependent library for your -DDEBUGGING version of perl.
496 You can do this by changing all the *archlib* variables in config.sh to
497 point to your new architecture-dependent library.
499 =head3 Environment access
501 Perl often needs to write to the program's environment, such as when C<%ENV>
502 is assigned to. Many implementations of the C library function C<putenv()>
503 leak memory, so where possible perl will manipulate the environment directly
504 to avoid these leaks. The default is now to perform direct manipulation
505 whenever perl is running as a stand alone interpreter, and to call the safe
506 but potentially leaky C<putenv()> function when the perl interpreter is
507 embedded in another application. You can force perl to always use C<putenv()>
508 by compiling with C<-Accflags="-DPERL_USE_SAFE_PUTENV">, see section
509 L</"Altering Configure variables for C compiler switches etc.">.
510 You can force an embedded perl to use direct manipulation by setting
511 C<PL_use_safe_putenv = 0;> after the C<perl_construct()> call.
513 =head2 Installation Directories
515 The installation directories can all be changed by answering the
516 appropriate questions in Configure. For convenience, all the installation
517 questions are near the beginning of Configure. Do not include trailing
518 slashes on directory names. At any point during the Configure process,
519 you can answer a question with &-d and Configure will use the defaults
520 from then on. Alternatively, you can
522 grep '^install' config.sh
524 after Configure has run to verify the installation paths.
526 The defaults are intended to be reasonable and sensible for most
527 people building from sources. Those who build and distribute binary
528 distributions or who export perl to a range of systems will probably
529 need to alter them. If you are content to just accept the defaults,
530 you can safely skip the next section.
532 The directories set up by Configure fall into three broad categories.
536 =item Directories for the perl distribution
538 By default, Configure will use the following directories for 5.17.10.
539 $version is the full perl version number, including subversion, e.g.
540 5.12.3, and $archname is a string like sun4-sunos,
541 determined by Configure. The full definitions of all Configure
542 variables are in the file Porting/Glossary.
544 Configure variable Default value
545 $prefixexp /usr/local
546 $binexp $prefixexp/bin
547 $scriptdirexp $prefixexp/bin
548 $privlibexp $prefixexp/lib/perl5/$version
549 $archlibexp $prefixexp/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
550 $man1direxp $prefixexp/man/man1
551 $man3direxp $prefixexp/man/man3
555 $prefixexp is generated from $prefix, with ~ expansion done to convert home
556 directories into absolute paths. Similarly for the other variables listed. As
557 file system calls do not do this, you should always reference the ...exp
558 variables, to support users who build perl in their home directory.
560 Actually, Configure recognizes the SVR3-style
561 /usr/local/man/l_man/man1 directories, if present, and uses those
562 instead. Also, if $prefix contains the string "perl", the library
563 directories are simplified as described below. For simplicity, only
564 the common style is shown here.
566 =item Directories for site-specific add-on files
568 After perl is installed, you may later wish to add modules (e.g. from
569 CPAN) or scripts. Configure will set up the following directories to
570 be used for installing those add-on modules and scripts.
574 $siteprefixexp $prefixexp
575 $sitebinexp $siteprefixexp/bin
576 $sitescriptexp $siteprefixexp/bin
577 $sitelibexp $siteprefixexp/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
579 $siteprefixexp/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
580 $siteman1direxp $siteprefixexp/man/man1
581 $siteman3direxp $siteprefixexp/man/man3
582 $sitehtml1direxp (none)
583 $sitehtml3direxp (none)
585 By default, ExtUtils::MakeMaker will install architecture-independent
586 modules into $sitelib and architecture-dependent modules into $sitearch.
588 =item Directories for vendor-supplied add-on files
590 Lastly, if you are building a binary distribution of perl for
591 distribution, Configure can optionally set up the following directories
592 for you to use to distribute add-on modules.
596 $vendorprefixexp (none)
598 (The next ones are set only if vendorprefix is set.)
600 $vendorbinexp $vendorprefixexp/bin
601 $vendorscriptexp $vendorprefixexp/bin
602 $vendorlibexp $vendorprefixexp/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
604 $vendorprefixexp/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
605 $vendorman1direxp $vendorprefixexp/man/man1
606 $vendorman3direxp $vendorprefixexp/man/man3
607 $vendorhtml1direxp (none)
608 $vendorhtml3direxp (none)
610 These are normally empty, but may be set as needed. For example,
611 a vendor might choose the following settings:
614 $siteprefix /usr/local
617 This would have the effect of setting the following:
620 $scriptdirexp /usr/bin
621 $privlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/$version
622 $archlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/$version/$archname
623 $man1direxp /usr/man/man1
624 $man3direxp /usr/man/man3
626 $sitebinexp /usr/local/bin
627 $sitescriptexp /usr/local/bin
628 $sitelibexp /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version
629 $sitearchexp /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/$version/$archname
630 $siteman1direxp /usr/local/man/man1
631 $siteman3direxp /usr/local/man/man3
633 $vendorbinexp /usr/bin
634 $vendorscriptexp /usr/bin
635 $vendorlibexp /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version
636 $vendorarchexp /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/$version/$archname
637 $vendorman1direxp /usr/man/man1
638 $vendorman3direxp /usr/man/man3
640 Note how in this example, the vendor-supplied directories are in the
641 /usr hierarchy, while the directories reserved for the end user are in
642 the /usr/local hierarchy.
644 The entire installed library hierarchy is installed in locations with
645 version numbers, keeping the installations of different versions distinct.
646 However, later installations of Perl can still be configured to search the
647 installed libraries corresponding to compatible earlier versions.
648 See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> below for more details
649 on how Perl can be made to search older version directories.
651 Of course you may use these directories however you see fit. For
652 example, you may wish to use $siteprefix for site-specific files that
653 are stored locally on your own disk and use $vendorprefix for
654 site-specific files that are stored elsewhere on your organization's
655 network. One way to do that would be something like
657 sh Configure -Dsiteprefix=/usr/local -Dvendorprefix=/usr/share/perl
661 As a final catch-all, Configure also offers an $otherlibdirs
662 variable. This variable contains a colon-separated list of additional
663 directories to add to @INC. By default, it will be empty.
664 Perl will search these directories (including architecture and
665 version-specific subdirectories) for add-on modules and extensions.
667 For example, if you have a bundle of perl libraries from a previous
668 installation, perhaps in a strange place:
670 Configure -Dotherlibdirs=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1
674 There is one other way of adding paths to @INC at perl build time, and
675 that is by setting the APPLLIB_EXP C pre-processor token to a colon-
676 separated list of directories, like this
678 sh Configure -Accflags='-DAPPLLIB_EXP=\"/usr/libperl\"'
680 The directories defined by APPLLIB_EXP get added to @INC I<first>,
681 ahead of any others, and so provide a way to override the standard perl
682 modules should you, for example, want to distribute fixes without
683 touching the perl distribution proper. And, like otherlib dirs,
684 version and architecture specific subdirectories are also searched, if
685 present, at run time. Of course, you can still search other @INC
686 directories ahead of those in APPLLIB_EXP by using any of the standard
687 run-time methods: $PERLLIB, $PERL5LIB, -I, use lib, etc.
689 =item usesitecustomize
691 Run-time customization of @INC can be enabled with:
693 sh Configure -Dusesitecustomize
695 which will define USE_SITECUSTOMIZE and $Config{usesitecustomize}.
696 When enabled, this makes perl run F<$sitelibexp/sitecustomize.pl> before
697 anything else. This script can then be set up to add additional
702 By default, man pages will be installed in $man1dir and $man3dir, which
703 are normally /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man3. If you
704 want to use a .3pm suffix for perl man pages, you can do that with
706 sh Configure -Dman3ext=3pm
710 Currently, the standard perl installation does not do anything with
711 HTML documentation, but that may change in the future. Further, some
712 add-on modules may wish to install HTML documents. The html Configure
713 variables listed above are provided if you wish to specify where such
714 documents should be placed. The default is "none", but will likely
715 eventually change to something useful based on user feedback.
719 Some users prefer to append a "/share" to $privlib and $sitelib
720 to emphasize that those directories can be shared among different
723 Note that these are just the defaults. You can actually structure the
724 directories any way you like. They don't even have to be on the same
727 Further details about the installation directories, maintenance and
728 development subversions, and about supporting multiple versions are
729 discussed in L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5"> below.
731 If you specify a prefix that contains the string "perl", then the
732 library directory structure is slightly simplified. Instead of
733 suggesting $prefix/lib/perl5/, Configure will suggest $prefix/lib.
735 Thus, for example, if you Configure with
736 -Dprefix=/opt/perl, then the default library directories for 5.9.0 are
738 Configure variable Default value
739 $privlib /opt/perl/lib/5.9.0
740 $archlib /opt/perl/lib/5.9.0/$archname
741 $sitelib /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.9.0
742 $sitearch /opt/perl/lib/site_perl/5.9.0/$archname
744 =head2 Changing the installation directory
746 Configure distinguishes between the directory in which perl (and its
747 associated files) should be installed, and the directory in which it
748 will eventually reside. For most sites, these two are the same; for
749 sites that use AFS, this distinction is handled automatically.
750 However, sites that use package management software such as rpm or
751 dpkg, or users building binary packages for distribution may also
752 wish to install perl into a different directory before moving perl
753 to its final destination. There are two ways to do that:
759 To install perl under the /tmp/perl5 directory, use the following
762 sh Configure -Dinstallprefix=/tmp/perl5
764 (replace /tmp/perl5 by a directory of your choice).
766 Beware, though, that if you go to try to install new add-on
767 modules, they too will get installed in under '/tmp/perl5' if you
768 follow this example. That's why it's usually better to use DESTDIR,
769 as shown in the next section.
773 If you need to install perl on many identical systems, it is convenient
774 to compile it once and create an archive that can be installed on
775 multiple systems. Suppose, for example, that you want to create an
776 archive that can be installed in /opt/perl. One way to do that is by
777 using the DESTDIR variable during C<make install>. The DESTDIR is
778 automatically prepended to all the installation paths. Thus you
781 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl -des
784 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/perl5
785 cd /tmp/perl5/opt/perl
786 tar cvf /tmp/perl5-archive.tar .
790 =head2 Relocatable @INC
792 To create a relocatable perl tree, use the following command line:
794 sh Configure -Duserelocatableinc
796 Then the paths in @INC (and everything else in %Config) can be
797 optionally located via the path of the perl executable.
799 That means that, if the string ".../" is found at the start of any
800 path, it's substituted with the directory of $^X. So, the relocation
801 can be configured on a per-directory basis, although the default with
802 "-Duserelocatableinc" is that everything is relocated. The initial
803 install is done to the original configured prefix.
805 This option is not compatible with the building of a shared libperl
806 ("-Duseshrplib"), because in that case perl is linked with an hard-coded
807 rpath that points at the libperl.so, that cannot be relocated.
809 =head2 Site-wide Policy settings
811 After Configure runs, it stores a number of common site-wide "policy"
812 answers (such as installation directories) in the Policy.sh file.
813 If you want to build perl on another system using the same policy
814 defaults, simply copy the Policy.sh file to the new system's perl build
815 directory, and Configure will use it. This will work even if Policy.sh was
816 generated for another version of Perl, or on a system with a
817 different architecture and/or operating system. However, in such cases,
818 you should review the contents of the file before using it: for
819 example, your new target may not keep its man pages in the same place
820 as the system on which the file was generated.
822 Alternatively, if you wish to change some or all of those policy
827 to ensure that Configure doesn't re-use them.
829 Further information is in the Policy_sh.SH file itself.
831 If the generated Policy.sh file is unsuitable, you may freely edit it
832 to contain any valid shell commands. It will be run just after the
833 platform-specific hints files.
835 =head2 Disabling older versions of Perl
837 Configure will search for binary compatible versions of previously
838 installed perl binaries in the tree that is specified as target tree,
839 and these will be used as locations to search for modules by the perl
840 being built. The list of perl versions found will be put in the Configure
841 variable inc_version_list.
843 To disable this use of older perl modules, even completely valid pure perl
844 modules, you can specify to not include the paths found:
846 sh Configure -Dinc_version_list=none ...
848 If you do want to use modules from some previous perl versions, the variable
849 must contain a space separated list of directories under the site_perl
850 directory, and has to include architecture-dependent directories separately,
853 sh Configure -Dinc_version_list="5.16.0/x86_64-linux 5.16.0" ...
855 When using the newer perl, you can add these paths again in the
856 PERL5LIB environment variable or with perl's -I runtime option.
858 =head2 Building Perl outside of the source directory
860 Sometimes it is desirable to build Perl in a directory different from
861 where the sources are, for example if you want to keep your sources
862 read-only, or if you want to share the sources between different binary
863 architectures. You can do this (if your file system supports symbolic
866 mkdir /tmp/perl/build/directory
867 cd /tmp/perl/build/directory
868 sh /path/to/perl/source/Configure -Dmksymlinks ...
870 This will create in /tmp/perl/build/directory a tree of symbolic links
871 pointing to files in /path/to/perl/source. The original files are left
872 unaffected. After Configure has finished you can just say
878 as usual, and Perl will be built in /tmp/perl/build/directory.
880 =head2 Building a debugging perl
882 You can run perl scripts under the perl debugger at any time with
883 B<perl -d your_script>. If, however, you want to debug perl itself,
884 you probably want to have support for perl internal debugging code
885 (activated by adding -DDEBUGGING to ccflags), and/or support for the
886 system debugger by adding -g to the optimisation flags. For that,
889 sh Configure -DDEBUGGING
893 sh Configure -DDEBUGGING=<mode>
895 For a more eye appealing call, -DEBUGGING is defined to be an alias
896 for -DDEBUGGING. For both, the -U calls are also supported, in order
897 to be able to overrule the hints or Policy.sh settings.
899 Here are the DEBUGGING modes:
907 =item -DEBUGGING=both
909 Sets both -DDEBUGGING in the ccflags, and adds -g to optimize.
911 You can actually specify -g and -DDEBUGGING independently (see below),
912 but usually it's convenient to have both.
918 Adds -g to optimize, but does not set -DDEBUGGING.
920 (Note: Your system may actually require something like cc -g2.
921 Check your man pages for cc(1) and also any hint file for your system.)
923 =item -DEBUGGING=none
927 Removes -g from optimize, and -DDEBUGGING from ccflags.
931 If you are using a shared libperl, see the warnings about multiple
932 versions of perl under L<Building a shared Perl library>.
934 Note that a perl built with -DDEBUGGING will be much bigger and will run
935 much, much more slowly than a standard perl.
937 =head2 DTrace support
939 On platforms where DTrace is available, it may be enabled by
940 using the -Dusedtrace option to Configure. DTrace probes are available for
941 subroutine entry (sub-entry) and subroutine exit (sub-exit). Here's a
942 simple D script that uses them:
944 perl$target:::sub-entry, perl$target:::sub-return {
945 printf("%s %s (%s:%d)\n", probename == "sub-entry" ? "->" : "<-",
946 copyinstr(arg0), copyinstr(arg1), arg2);
952 Perl ships with a number of standard extensions. These are contained
953 in the ext/ subdirectory.
955 By default, Configure will offer to build every extension which appears
956 to be supported. For example, Configure will offer to build GDBM_File
957 only if it is able to find the gdbm library.
959 To disable certain extensions so that they are not built, use the
960 -Dnoextensions=... and -Donlyextensions=... options. They both accept
961 a space-separated list of extensions, such as C<IPC/SysV>. The extensions
963 C<noextensions> are removed from the list of extensions to build, while
964 the C<onlyextensions> is rather more severe and builds only the listed
965 extensions. The latter should be used with extreme caution since
966 certain extensions are used by many other extensions and modules:
967 examples of such modules include Fcntl and IO. The order of processing
968 these options is first C<only> (if present), then C<no> (if present).
970 Of course, you may always run Configure interactively and select only
971 the extensions you want.
973 If you unpack any additional extensions in the ext/ directory before
974 running Configure, then Configure will offer to build those additional
975 extensions as well. Most users probably shouldn't have to do this --
976 it is usually easier to build additional extensions later after perl
977 has been installed. However, if you wish to have those additional
978 extensions statically linked into the perl binary, then this offers a
979 convenient way to do that in one step. (It is not necessary, however;
980 you can build and install extensions just fine even if you don't have
981 dynamic loading. See lib/ExtUtils/MakeMaker.pm for more details.)
982 Another way of specifying extra modules is described in
983 L<"Adding extra modules to the build"> below.
985 If you re-use an old config.sh but change your system (e.g. by
986 adding libgdbm) Configure will still offer your old choices of extensions
987 for the default answer, but it will also point out the discrepancy to
990 =head2 Including locally-installed libraries
992 Perl comes with interfaces to number of libraries, including threads,
993 dbm, ndbm, gdbm, and Berkeley db. For the *db* extension, if
994 Configure can find the appropriate header files and libraries, it will
995 automatically include that extension. The threading extension needs
996 to be specified explicitly (see L</Threads>).
998 Those libraries are not distributed with perl. If your header (.h) files
999 for those libraries are not in a directory normally searched by your C
1000 compiler, then you will need to include the appropriate -I/your/directory
1001 option when prompted by Configure. If your libraries are not in a
1002 directory normally searched by your C compiler and linker, then you will
1003 need to include the appropriate -L/your/directory option when prompted
1004 by Configure. See the examples below.
1010 =item gdbm in /usr/local
1012 Suppose you have gdbm and want Configure to find it and build the
1013 GDBM_File extension. This example assumes you have gdbm.h
1014 installed in /usr/local/include/gdbm.h and libgdbm.a installed in
1015 /usr/local/lib/libgdbm.a. Configure should figure all the
1016 necessary steps out automatically.
1018 Specifically, when Configure prompts you for flags for
1019 your C compiler, you should include -I/usr/local/include, if it's
1020 not here yet. Similarly, when Configure prompts you for linker flags,
1021 you should include -L/usr/local/lib.
1023 If you are using dynamic loading, then when Configure prompts you for
1024 linker flags for dynamic loading, you should again include
1027 Again, this should all happen automatically. This should also work if
1028 you have gdbm installed in any of (/usr/local, /opt/local, /usr/gnu,
1029 /opt/gnu, /usr/GNU, or /opt/GNU).
1031 =item BerkeleyDB in /usr/local/BerkeleyDB
1033 The version of BerkeleyDB distributed by Oracle installs in a
1034 version-specific directory by default, typically something like
1035 /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7. To have Configure find that, you need to add
1036 -I/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include to cc flags, as in the previous example,
1037 and you will also have to take extra steps to help Configure find -ldb.
1038 Specifically, when Configure prompts you for library directories,
1039 add /usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib to the list. Also, you will need to
1040 add appropriate linker flags to tell the runtime linker where to find the
1041 BerkeleyDB shared libraries.
1043 It is possible to specify this from the command line (all on one
1047 -Dlocincpth='/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/include \
1048 /usr/local/include' \
1049 -Dloclibpth='/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib /usr/local/lib' \
1050 -Aldflags='-R/usr/local/BerkeleyDB.4.7/lib'
1052 locincpth is a space-separated list of include directories to search.
1053 Configure will automatically add the appropriate -I directives.
1055 loclibpth is a space-separated list of library directories to search.
1056 Configure will automatically add the appropriate -L directives.
1058 The addition to ldflags is so that the dynamic linker knows where to find
1059 the BerkeleyDB libraries. For Linux and Solaris, the -R option does that.
1060 Other systems may use different flags. Use the appropriate flag for your
1065 =head2 Overriding an old config.sh
1067 If you want to use an old config.sh produced by a previous run of
1068 Configure, but override some of the items with command line options, you
1069 need to use B<Configure -O>.
1071 =head2 GNU-style configure
1073 If you prefer the GNU-style configure command line interface, you can
1074 use the supplied configure.gnu command, e.g.
1076 CC=gcc ./configure.gnu
1078 The configure.gnu script emulates a few of the more common configure
1081 ./configure.gnu --help
1085 (The file is called configure.gnu to avoid problems on systems
1086 that would not distinguish the files "Configure" and "configure".)
1088 =head2 Malloc Issues
1090 Perl relies heavily on malloc(3) to grow data structures as needed,
1091 so perl's performance can be noticeably affected by the performance of
1092 the malloc function on your system. The perl source is shipped with a
1093 version of malloc that has been optimized for the typical requests from
1094 perl, so there's a chance that it may be both faster and use less memory
1095 than your system malloc.
1097 However, if your system already has an excellent malloc, or if you are
1098 experiencing difficulties with extensions that use third-party libraries
1099 that call malloc, then you should probably use your system's malloc.
1100 (Or, you might wish to explore the malloc flags discussed below.)
1104 =item Using the system malloc
1106 To build without perl's malloc, you can use the Configure command
1108 sh Configure -Uusemymalloc
1110 or you can answer 'n' at the appropriate interactive Configure prompt.
1112 Note that Perl's malloc isn't always used by default; that actually
1113 depends on your system. For example, on Linux and FreeBSD (and many more
1114 systems), Configure chooses to use the system's malloc by default.
1115 See the appropriate file in the F<hints/> directory to see how the
1118 =item -DPERL_POLLUTE_MALLOC
1120 NOTE: This flag is enabled automatically on some platforms if you just
1121 run Configure to accept all the defaults.
1123 Perl's malloc family of functions are normally called Perl_malloc(),
1124 Perl_realloc(), Perl_calloc() and Perl_mfree().
1125 These names do not clash with the system versions of these functions.
1127 If this flag is enabled, however, Perl's malloc family of functions
1128 will have the same names as the system versions. This may be required
1129 sometimes if you have libraries that like to free() data that may have
1130 been allocated by Perl_malloc() and vice versa.
1132 Note that enabling this option may sometimes lead to duplicate symbols
1133 from the linker for malloc et al. In such cases, the system probably
1134 does not allow its malloc functions to be fully replaced with custom
1137 =item -DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS
1139 This flag enables debugging mstats, which is required to use the
1140 Devel::Peek::mstat() function. You cannot enable this unless you are
1141 using Perl's malloc, so a typical Configure command would be
1143 sh Configure -Accflags=-DPERL_DEBUGGING_MSTATS -Dusemymalloc
1145 to enable this option.
1149 =head2 What if it doesn't work?
1151 If you run into problems, try some of the following ideas.
1152 If none of them help, then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
1156 =item Running Configure Interactively
1158 If Configure runs into trouble, remember that you can always run
1159 Configure interactively so that you can check (and correct) its
1162 All the installation questions have been moved to the top, so you don't
1163 have to wait for them. Once you've handled them (and your C compiler and
1164 flags) you can type &-d at the next Configure prompt and Configure
1165 will use the defaults from then on.
1167 If you find yourself trying obscure command line incantations and
1168 config.over tricks, I recommend you run Configure interactively
1169 instead. You'll probably save yourself time in the long run.
1173 Hint files tell Configure about a number of things:
1179 The peculiarities or conventions of particular platforms -- non-standard
1180 library locations and names, default installation locations for binaries,
1185 The deficiencies of the platform -- for example, library functions that,
1186 although present, are too badly broken to be usable; or limits on
1187 resources that are generously available on most platforms.
1191 How best to optimize for the platform, both in terms of binary size and/or
1192 speed, and for Perl feature support. Because of wide variations in the
1193 implementation of shared libraries and of threading, for example, Configure
1194 often needs hints in order to be able to use these features.
1198 The perl distribution includes many system-specific hints files
1199 in the hints/ directory. If one of them matches your system, Configure
1200 will offer to use that hint file. Unless you have a very good reason
1201 not to, you should accept its offer.
1203 Several of the hint files contain additional important information.
1204 If you have any problems, it is a good idea to read the relevant hint file
1205 for further information. See hints/solaris_2.sh for an extensive example.
1206 More information about writing good hints is in the hints/README.hints
1207 file, which also explains hint files known as callback-units.
1209 Note that any hint file is read before any Policy file, meaning that
1210 Policy overrides hints -- see L</Site-wide Policy settings>.
1214 If you are re-using an old config.sh, it's possible that Configure detects
1215 different values from the ones specified in this file. You will almost
1216 always want to keep the previous value, unless you have changed something
1219 For example, suppose you have added libgdbm.a to your system
1220 and you decide to reconfigure perl to use GDBM_File. When you run
1221 Configure again, you will need to add -lgdbm to the list of libraries.
1222 Now, Configure will find your gdbm include file and library and will
1225 *** WHOA THERE!!! ***
1226 The previous value for $i_gdbm on this machine was "undef"!
1227 Keep the previous value? [y]
1229 In this case, you do not want to keep the previous value, so you
1230 should answer 'n'. (You'll also have to manually add GDBM_File to
1231 the list of dynamic extensions to build.)
1233 =item Changing Compilers
1235 If you change compilers or make other significant changes, you should
1236 probably not re-use your old config.sh. Simply remove it or
1237 rename it, then rerun Configure with the options you want to use.
1239 =item Propagating your changes to config.sh
1241 If you make any changes to config.sh, you should propagate
1242 them to all the .SH files by running
1246 You will then have to rebuild by running
1251 =item config.over and config.arch
1253 You can also supply a shell script config.over to override
1254 Configure's guesses. It will get loaded up at the very end, just
1255 before config.sh is created. You have to be careful with this,
1256 however, as Configure does no checking that your changes make sense.
1257 This file is usually good for site-specific customizations.
1259 There is also another file that, if it exists, is loaded before the
1260 config.over, called config.arch. This file is intended to be per
1261 architecture, not per site, and usually it's the architecture-specific
1262 hints file that creates the config.arch.
1266 Many of the system dependencies are contained in config.h.
1267 Configure builds config.h by running the config_h.SH script.
1268 The values for the variables are taken from config.sh.
1270 If there are any problems, you can edit config.h directly. Beware,
1271 though, that the next time you run Configure, your changes will be
1276 If you have any additional changes to make to the C compiler command
1277 line, they can be made in cflags.SH. For instance, to turn off the
1278 optimizer on toke.c, find the switch structure marked 'or customize here',
1279 and add a line for toke.c ahead of the catch-all *) so that it now reads:
1284 toke) optimize='-g' ;;
1287 You should not edit the generated file cflags directly, as your changes will
1288 be lost the next time you run Configure, or if you edit config.sh.
1290 To explore various ways of changing ccflags from within a hint file,
1291 see the file hints/README.hints.
1293 To change the C flags for all the files, edit config.sh and change either
1294 $ccflags or $optimize, and then re-run
1301 If you don't have sh, you'll have to copy the sample file
1302 Porting/config.sh to config.sh and edit your config.sh to reflect your
1303 system's peculiarities. See Porting/pumpkin.pod for more information.
1304 You'll probably also have to extensively modify the extension building
1307 =item Porting information
1309 Specific information for the OS/2, Plan 9, VMS and Win32 ports is in the
1310 corresponding README files and subdirectories. Additional information,
1311 including a glossary of all those config.sh variables, is in the Porting
1312 subdirectory. Porting/Glossary should especially come in handy.
1314 Ports for other systems may also be available. You should check out
1315 http://www.cpan.org/ports for current information on ports to
1316 various other operating systems.
1318 If you plan to port Perl to a new architecture, study carefully the
1319 section titled "Philosophical Issues in Patching and Porting Perl"
1320 in the file Porting/pumpkin.pod and the file pod/perlgit.pod.
1321 Study also how other non-UNIX ports have solved problems.
1325 =head2 Adding extra modules to the build
1327 You can specify extra modules or module bundles to be fetched from the
1328 CPAN and installed as part of the Perl build. Either use the -Dextras=...
1329 command line parameter to Configure, for example like this:
1331 Configure -Dextras="Bundle::LWP DBI"
1333 or answer first 'y' to the question 'Install any extra modules?' and
1334 then answer "Bundle::LWP DBI" to the 'Extras?' question.
1335 The module or the bundle names are as for the CPAN module 'install' command.
1336 This will only work if those modules are to be built as dynamic
1337 extensions. If you wish to include those extra modules as static
1338 extensions, see L<"Extensions"> above.
1340 Notice that because the CPAN module will be used to fetch the extra
1341 modules, you will need access to the CPAN, either via the Internet,
1342 or via a local copy such as a CD-ROM or a local CPAN mirror. If you
1343 do not, using the extra modules option will die horribly.
1345 Also notice that you yourself are responsible for satisfying any extra
1346 dependencies such as external headers or libraries BEFORE trying the build.
1347 For example: you will need to have the Foo database specific
1348 headers and libraries installed for the DBD::Foo module. The Configure
1349 process or the Perl build process will not help you with these.
1353 suidperl was an optional component of earlier releases of perl. It is no
1354 longer available. Instead, use a tool specifically designed to handle
1355 changes in privileges, such as B<sudo>.
1359 This will look for all the includes. The output is stored in makefile.
1360 The only difference between Makefile and makefile is the dependencies at
1361 the bottom of makefile. If you have to make any changes, you should edit
1362 makefile, not Makefile, since the Unix make command reads makefile first.
1363 (On non-Unix systems, the output may be stored in a different file.
1364 Check the value of $firstmakefile in your config.sh if in doubt.)
1366 Configure will offer to do this step for you, so it isn't listed
1371 This will attempt to make perl in the current directory.
1373 =head2 Expected errors
1375 These error reports are normal, and can be ignored:
1378 make: [extra.pods] Error 1 (ignored)
1380 make: [extras.make] Error 1 (ignored)
1382 =head2 What if it doesn't work?
1384 If you can't compile successfully, try some of the following ideas.
1385 If none of them help, and careful reading of the error message and
1386 the relevant manual pages on your system doesn't help,
1387 then see L<"Reporting Problems"> below.
1393 If you used a hint file, try reading the comments in the hint file
1394 for further tips and information.
1398 If you can successfully build miniperl, but the process crashes
1399 during the building of extensions, run
1403 to test your version of miniperl.
1407 If you have any locale-related environment variables set, try unsetting
1408 them. I have some reports that some versions of IRIX hang while
1409 running B<./miniperl configpm> with locales other than the C locale.
1410 See the discussion under L<"make test"> below about locales and the
1411 whole L<perllocale/"LOCALE PROBLEMS"> section in the file pod/perllocale.pod.
1412 The latter is especially useful if you see something like this
1414 perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
1415 perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
1418 are supported and installed on your system.
1419 perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
1423 =item other environment variables
1425 Configure does not check for environment variables that can sometimes
1426 have a major influence on how perl is built or tested. For example,
1427 OBJECT_MODE on AIX determines the way the compiler and linker deal with
1428 their objects, but this is a variable that only influences build-time
1429 behaviour, and should not affect the perl scripts that are eventually
1430 executed by the perl binary. Other variables, like PERL_UNICODE,
1431 PERL5LIB, and PERL5OPT will influence the behaviour of the test suite.
1432 So if you are getting strange test failures, you may want to try
1433 retesting with the various PERL variables unset.
1437 If you get varargs problems with gcc, be sure that gcc is installed
1438 correctly and that you are not passing -I/usr/include to gcc. When using
1439 gcc, you should probably have i_stdarg='define' and i_varargs='undef'
1440 in config.sh. The problem is usually solved by installing gcc
1441 correctly. If you do change config.sh, don't forget to propagate
1442 your changes (see L<"Propagating your changes to config.sh"> below).
1443 See also the L<"vsprintf"> item below.
1447 If you get error messages such as the following (the exact line
1448 numbers and function name may vary in different versions of perl):
1450 util.c: In function 'Perl_form':
1451 util.c:1107: number of arguments doesn't match prototype
1452 proto.h:125: prototype declaration
1454 it might well be a symptom of the gcc "varargs problem". See the
1455 previous L<"varargs"> item.
1457 =item LD_LIBRARY_PATH
1459 If you run into dynamic loading problems, check your setting of
1460 the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. If you're creating a static
1461 Perl library (libperl.a rather than libperl.so) it should build
1462 fine with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset, though that may depend on details
1463 of your local setup.
1467 If Configure seems to be having trouble finding library functions,
1468 try not using nm extraction. You can do this from the command line
1471 sh Configure -Uusenm
1473 or by answering the nm extraction question interactively.
1474 If you have previously run Configure, you should not reuse your old
1477 =item umask not found
1479 If the build processes encounters errors relating to umask(), the problem
1480 is probably that Configure couldn't find your umask() system call.
1481 Check your config.sh. You should have d_umask='define'. If you don't,
1482 this is probably the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above. Also,
1483 try reading the hints file for your system for further information.
1487 If you run into problems with vsprintf in compiling util.c, the
1488 problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
1489 version of vsprintf(). Check whether your system has vprintf().
1490 (Virtually all modern Unix systems do.) Then, check the variable
1491 d_vprintf in config.sh. If your system has vprintf, it should be:
1495 If Configure guessed wrong, it is likely that Configure guessed wrong
1496 on a number of other common functions too. This is probably
1497 the L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
1501 If you run into problems relating to do_aspawn or do_spawn, the
1502 problem is probably that Configure failed to detect your system's
1503 fork() function. Follow the procedure in the previous item
1504 on L<"nm extraction">.
1506 =item __inet_* errors
1508 If you receive unresolved symbol errors during Perl build and/or test
1509 referring to __inet_* symbols, check to see whether BIND 8.1 is
1510 installed. It installs a /usr/local/include/arpa/inet.h that refers to
1511 these symbols. Versions of BIND later than 8.1 do not install inet.h
1512 in that location and avoid the errors. You should probably update to a
1513 newer version of BIND (and remove the files the old one left behind).
1514 If you can't, you can either link with the updated resolver library provided
1515 with BIND 8.1 or rename /usr/local/bin/arpa/inet.h during the Perl build and
1516 test process to avoid the problem.
1518 =item .*_r() prototype NOT found
1520 On a related note, if you see a bunch of complaints like the above about
1521 reentrant functions -- specifically networking-related ones -- being present
1522 but without prototypes available, check to see if BIND 8.1 (or possibly
1523 other BIND 8 versions) is (or has been) installed. They install
1524 header files such as netdb.h into places such as /usr/local/include (or into
1525 another directory as specified at build/install time), at least optionally.
1526 Remove them or put them in someplace that isn't in the C preprocessor's
1527 header file include search path (determined by -I options plus defaults,
1528 normally /usr/include).
1530 =item #error "No DATAMODEL_NATIVE specified"
1532 This is a common error when trying to build perl on Solaris 2.6 with a
1533 gcc installation from Solaris 2.5 or 2.5.1. The Solaris header files
1534 changed, so you need to update your gcc installation. You can either
1535 rerun the fixincludes script from gcc or take the opportunity to
1536 update your gcc installation.
1540 If you can't compile successfully, try turning off your compiler's
1541 optimizer. Edit config.sh and change the line
1549 then propagate your changes with B<sh Configure -S> and rebuild
1550 with B<make depend; make>.
1552 =item Missing functions and Undefined symbols
1554 If the build of miniperl fails with a long list of missing functions or
1555 undefined symbols, check the libs variable in the config.sh file. It
1556 should look something like
1558 libs='-lsocket -lnsl -ldl -lm -lc'
1560 The exact libraries will vary from system to system, but you typically
1561 need to include at least the math library -lm. Normally, Configure
1562 will suggest the correct defaults. If the libs variable is empty, you
1563 need to start all over again. Run
1567 and start from the very beginning. This time, unless you are sure of
1568 what you are doing, accept the default list of libraries suggested by
1571 If the libs variable looks correct, you might have the
1572 L<"nm extraction"> problem discussed above.
1574 If you still have missing routines or undefined symbols, you probably
1575 need to add some library or other, or you need to undefine some feature
1576 that Configure thought was there but is defective or incomplete. If
1577 you used a hint file, see if it has any relevant advice. You can also
1578 look through through config.h for likely suspects.
1582 Some compilers will not compile or optimize the larger files (such as
1583 toke.c) without some extra switches to use larger jump offsets or
1584 allocate larger internal tables. You can customize the switches for
1585 each file in cflags.SH. It's okay to insert rules for specific files into
1586 makefile since a default rule only takes effect in the absence of a
1589 =item Missing dbmclose
1591 SCO prior to 3.2.4 may be missing dbmclose(). An upgrade to 3.2.4
1592 that includes libdbm.nfs (which includes dbmclose()) may be available.
1594 =item error: too few arguments to function 'dbmclose'
1596 Building ODBM_File on some (Open)SUSE distributions might run into this
1597 error, as the header file is broken. There are two ways to deal with this
1599 1. Disable the use of ODBM_FILE
1601 Configure ... -Dnoextensions=ODBM_File
1603 2. Fix the header file, somewhat like this:
1605 --- a/usr/include/dbm.h 2010-03-24 08:54:59.000000000 +0100
1606 +++ b/usr/include/dbm.h 2010-03-24 08:55:15.000000000 +0100
1607 @@ -59,4 +59,4 @@ extern datum firstkey __P((void));
1609 extern datum nextkey __P((datum key));
1611 -extern int dbmclose __P((DBM *));
1612 +extern int dbmclose __P((void));
1614 =item Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lsomething
1616 If you see such a message during the building of an extension, but
1617 the extension passes its tests anyway (see L<"make test"> below),
1618 then don't worry about the warning message. The extension
1619 Makefile.PL goes looking for various libraries needed on various
1620 systems; few systems will need all the possible libraries listed.
1621 Most users will see warnings for the ones they don't have. The
1622 phrase 'probably harmless' is intended to reassure you that nothing
1623 unusual is happening, and the build process is continuing.
1625 On the other hand, if you are building GDBM_File and you get the
1628 Note (probably harmless): No library found for -lgdbm
1630 then it's likely you're going to run into trouble somewhere along
1631 the line, since it's hard to see how you can use the GDBM_File
1632 extension without the -lgdbm library.
1634 It is true that, in principle, Configure could have figured all of
1635 this out, but Configure and the extension building process are not
1636 quite that tightly coordinated.
1638 =item sh: ar: not found
1640 This is a message from your shell telling you that the command 'ar'
1641 was not found. You need to check your PATH environment variable to
1642 make sure that it includes the directory with the 'ar' command. This
1643 is a common problem on Solaris, where 'ar' is in the /usr/ccs/bin
1646 =item db-recno failure on tests 51, 53 and 55
1648 Old versions of the DB library (including the DB library which comes
1649 with FreeBSD 2.1) had broken handling of recno databases with modified
1650 bval settings. Upgrade your DB library or OS.
1652 =item Bad arg length for semctl, is XX, should be ZZZ
1654 If you get this error message from the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem test, your System
1655 V IPC may be broken. The XX typically is 20, and that is what ZZZ
1656 also should be. Consider upgrading your OS, or reconfiguring your OS
1657 to include the System V semaphores.
1659 =item ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem........semget: No space left on device
1661 Either your account or the whole system has run out of semaphores. Or
1662 both. Either list the semaphores with "ipcs" and remove the unneeded
1663 ones (which ones these are depends on your system and applications)
1664 with "ipcrm -s SEMAPHORE_ID_HERE" or configure more semaphores to your
1669 If you mix GNU binutils (nm, ld, ar) with equivalent vendor-supplied
1670 tools you may be in for some trouble. For example creating archives
1671 with an old GNU 'ar' and then using a new current vendor-supplied 'ld'
1672 may lead into linking problems. Either recompile your GNU binutils
1673 under your current operating system release, or modify your PATH not
1674 to include the GNU utils before running Configure, or specify the
1675 vendor-supplied utilities explicitly to Configure, for example by
1676 Configure -Dar=/bin/ar.
1678 =item THIS PACKAGE SEEMS TO BE INCOMPLETE
1680 The F<Configure> program has not been able to find all the files which
1681 make up the complete Perl distribution. You may have a damaged source
1682 archive file (in which case you may also have seen messages such as
1683 C<gzip: stdin: unexpected end of file> and C<tar: Unexpected EOF on
1684 archive file>), or you may have obtained a structurally-sound but
1685 incomplete archive. In either case, try downloading again from the
1686 official site named at the start of this document. If you do find
1687 that any site is carrying a corrupted or incomplete source code
1688 archive, please report it to the site's maintainer.
1690 =item invalid token: ##
1692 You are using a non-ANSI-compliant C compiler. To compile Perl, you
1693 need to use a compiler that supports ANSI C. If there is a README
1694 file for your system, it may have further details on your compiler
1699 Some additional things that have been reported:
1701 Genix may need to use libc rather than libc_s, or #undef VARARGS.
1703 NCR Tower 32 (OS 2.01.01) may need -W2,-Sl,2000 and #undef MKDIR.
1705 UTS may need one or more of -K or -g, and #undef LSTAT.
1707 FreeBSD can fail the ext/IPC/SysV/t/sem.t test if SysV IPC has not been
1708 configured in the kernel. Perl tries to detect this, though, and
1709 you will get a message telling you what to do.
1711 Building Perl on a system that has also BIND (headers and libraries)
1712 installed may run into troubles because BIND installs its own netdb.h
1713 and socket.h, which may not agree with the operating system's ideas of
1714 the same files. Similarly, including -lbind may conflict with libc's
1715 view of the world. You may have to tweak -Dlocincpth and -Dloclibpth
1720 =head2 Cross-compilation
1722 Perl can be cross-compiled. It is just not trivial, cross-compilation
1723 rarely is. Perl is routinely cross-compiled for many platforms (as of
1724 June 2005 at least PocketPC aka WinCE, Open Zaurus, Symbian, and
1725 the IBM OS/400). These platforms are known as the B<target> platforms,
1726 while the systems where the compilation takes place are the B<host>
1729 What makes the situation difficult is that first of all,
1730 cross-compilation environments vary significantly in how they are set
1731 up and used, and secondly because the primary way of configuring Perl
1732 (using the rather large Unix-tool-dependent Configure script) is not
1733 awfully well suited for cross-compilation. However, starting from
1734 version 5.8.0, the Configure script also knows one way of supporting
1735 cross-compilation support, so please keep reading.
1737 See the following files for more information about compiling Perl for
1738 the particular platforms:
1742 =item WinCE/PocketPC
1760 Packaging and transferring either the core Perl modules or CPAN
1761 modules to the target platform is also left up to the each
1762 cross-compilation environment. Often the cross-compilation target
1763 platforms are somewhat limited in diskspace: see the section
1764 L<Minimizing the Perl installation> to learn more of the minimal set
1765 of files required for a functional Perl installation.
1767 For some cross-compilation environments the Configure option
1768 C<-Dinstallprefix=...> might be handy, see L<Changing the installation
1771 About the cross-compilation support of Configure: what is known to
1772 work is running Configure in a cross-compilation environment and
1773 building the miniperl executable. What is known not to work is
1774 building the perl executable because that would require building
1775 extensions: Dynaloader statically and File::Glob dynamically, for
1776 extensions one needs MakeMaker and MakeMaker is not yet
1777 cross-compilation aware, and neither is the main Makefile.
1779 The cross-compilation setup of Configure has successfully been used in
1780 at least two Linux cross-compilation environments. The setups were
1781 both such that the host system was Intel Linux with a gcc built for
1782 cross-compiling into ARM Linux, and there was a SSH connection to the
1785 To run Configure in cross-compilation mode the basic switch that
1786 has to be used is C<-Dusecrosscompile>.
1788 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile -D...
1790 This will make the cpp symbol USE_CROSS_COMPILE and the %Config
1791 symbol C<usecrosscompile> available, and C<xconfig.h> will be used
1792 for cross-compilation.
1794 During the Configure and build, certain helper scripts will be created
1795 into the Cross/ subdirectory. The scripts are used to execute a
1796 cross-compiled executable, and to transfer files to and from the
1797 target host. The execution scripts are named F<run-*> and the
1798 transfer scripts F<to-*> and F<from-*>. The part after the dash is
1799 the method to use for remote execution and transfer: by default the
1800 methods are B<ssh> and B<scp>, thus making the scripts F<run-ssh>,
1801 F<to-scp>, and F<from-scp>.
1803 To configure the scripts for a target host and a directory (in which
1804 the execution will happen and which is to and from where the transfer
1805 happens), supply Configure with
1807 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st -Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir
1809 The targethost is what e.g. ssh will use as the hostname, the targetdir
1810 must exist (the scripts won't create it), the targetdir defaults to /tmp.
1811 You can also specify a username to use for ssh/rsh logins
1815 but in case you don't, "root" will be used.
1817 Because this is a cross-compilation effort, you will also need to specify
1818 which target environment and which compilation environment to use.
1819 This includes the compiler, the header files, and the libraries.
1820 In the below we use the usual settings for the iPAQ cross-compilation
1823 -Dtargetarch=arm-linux
1825 -Dusrinc=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
1826 -Dincpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include
1827 -Dlibpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/lib
1829 If the name of the C<cc> has the usual GNU C semantics for cross
1830 compilers, that is, CPU-OS-gcc, the names of the C<ar>, C<nm>, and
1831 C<ranlib> will also be automatically chosen to be CPU-OS-ar and so on.
1832 (The C<ld> requires more thought and will be chosen later by Configure
1833 as appropriate.) Also, in this case the incpth, libpth, and usrinc
1834 will be guessed by Configure (unless explicitly set to something else,
1835 in which case Configure's guesses with be appended).
1837 In addition to the default execution/transfer methods you can also
1838 choose B<rsh> for execution, and B<rcp> or B<cp> for transfer,
1841 -Dtargetrun=rsh -Dtargetto=rcp -Dtargetfrom=cp
1843 Putting it all together:
1845 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1846 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1847 -Dtargetdir=/tar/get/dir \
1849 -Dtargetarch=arm-linux \
1850 -Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
1851 -Dusrinc=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include \
1852 -Dincpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/include \
1853 -Dlibpth=/skiff/local/arm-linux/lib \
1856 or if you are happy with the defaults:
1858 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1859 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1860 -Dcc=arm-linux-gcc \
1863 Another example where the cross-compiler has been installed under
1864 F</usr/local/arm/2.95.5>:
1866 sh ./Configure -des -Dusecrosscompile \
1867 -Dtargethost=so.me.ho.st \
1868 -Dcc=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5/bin/arm-linux-gcc \
1869 -Dincpth=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5/include \
1870 -Dusrinc=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5/include \
1871 -Dlibpth=/usr/local/arm/2.95.5/lib
1875 This will run the regression tests on the perl you just made. If
1876 'make test' doesn't say "All tests successful" then something went
1879 Note that you can't run the tests in background if this disables
1880 opening of /dev/tty. You can use 'make test-notty' in that case but
1881 a few tty tests will be skipped.
1883 =head2 What if make test doesn't work?
1885 If make test bombs out, just cd to the t directory and run ./TEST
1886 by hand to see if it makes any difference.
1888 One way to get more detailed information about failed tests and
1889 individual subtests is to run the harness from the t directory:
1891 cd t ; ./perl harness <list of tests>
1893 (this assumes that most basic tests succeed, since harness uses
1894 complicated constructs). If no list of tests is provided, harness
1897 If individual tests fail, you can often run them by hand (from the main
1898 perl directory), e.g.,
1900 ./perl -MTestInit t/op/groups.t
1902 You should also read the individual tests to see if there are any helpful
1903 comments that apply to your system. You may also need to setup your
1904 shared library path if you get errors like:
1906 /sbin/loader: Fatal Error: cannot map libperl.so
1908 The file t/README in the t subdirectory contains more information about
1909 running and modifying tests.
1911 See L</"Building a shared Perl library"> earlier in this document.
1917 Note: One possible reason for errors is that some external programs
1918 may be broken due to the combination of your environment and the way
1919 'make test' exercises them. For example, this may happen if you have
1920 one or more of these environment variables set: LC_ALL LC_CTYPE
1921 LC_COLLATE LANG. In some versions of UNIX, the non-English locales
1922 are known to cause programs to exhibit mysterious errors.
1924 If you have any of the above environment variables set, please try
1930 LC_ALL=C;export LC_ALL
1932 for Bourne or Korn shell) from the command line and then retry
1933 make test. If the tests then succeed, you may have a broken program that
1934 is confusing the testing. Please run the troublesome test by hand as
1935 shown above and see whether you can locate the program. Look for
1936 things like: exec, `backquoted command`, system, open("|...") or
1937 open("...|"). All these mean that Perl is trying to run some
1940 =item Timing problems
1942 Several tests in the test suite check timing functions, such as
1943 sleep(), and see if they return in a reasonable amount of time.
1944 If your system is quite busy and doesn't respond quickly enough,
1945 these tests might fail. If possible, try running the tests again
1946 with the system under a lighter load. These timing-sensitive
1947 and load-sensitive tests include F<t/op/alarm.t>,
1948 F<ext/Time-HiRes/t/HiRes.t>, F<ext/threads-shared/t/waithires.t>,
1949 F<ext/threads-shared/t/stress.t>, F<lib/Benchmark.t>,
1950 F<lib/Memoize/t/expmod_t.t>, and F<lib/Memoize/t/speed.t>.
1952 You might also experience some failures in F<t/op/stat.t> if you build
1953 perl on an NFS filesystem, if the remote clock and the system clock are
1958 On some systems, particularly those with smaller amounts of RAM, some
1959 of the tests in t/op/pat.t may fail with an "Out of memory" message.
1960 For example, on my SparcStation IPC with 12 MB of RAM, in perl5.5.670,
1961 test 85 will fail if run under either t/TEST or t/harness.
1963 Try stopping other jobs on the system and then running the test by itself:
1965 ./perl -MTestInit t/op/pat.t
1967 to see if you have any better luck. If your perl still fails this
1968 test, it does not necessarily mean you have a broken perl. This test
1969 tries to exercise the regular expression subsystem quite thoroughly,
1970 and may well be far more demanding than your normal usage.
1972 =item libgcc_s.so.1: cannot open shared object file
1974 This message has been reported on gcc-3.2.3 and earlier installed with
1975 a non-standard prefix. Setting the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable
1976 (or equivalent) to include gcc's lib/ directory with the libgcc_s.so.1
1977 shared library should fix the problem.
1979 =item Failures from lib/File/Temp/t/security saying "system possibly insecure"
1981 First, such warnings are not necessarily serious or indicative of a
1982 real security threat. That being said, they bear investigating.
1984 Note that each of the tests is run twice. The first time is in the
1985 directory returned by File::Spec->tmpdir() (often /tmp on Unix
1986 systems), and the second time in the directory from which the test was
1987 run (usually the 't' directory, if the test was run as part of 'make
1990 The tests may fail for the following reasons:
1992 (1) If the directory the tests are being run in is owned by somebody
1993 other than the user running the tests, or by root (uid 0).
1995 This failure can happen if the Perl source code distribution is
1996 unpacked in such a way that the user IDs in the distribution package
1997 are used as-is. Some tar programs do this.
1999 (2) If the directory the tests are being run in is writable by group or
2000 by others, and there is no sticky bit set for the directory. (With
2001 UNIX/POSIX semantics, write access to a directory means the right to
2002 add or remove files in that directory. The 'sticky bit' is a feature
2003 used in some UNIXes to give extra protection to files: if the bit is
2004 set for a directory, no one but the owner (or root) can remove that
2005 file even if the permissions would otherwise allow file removal by
2008 This failure may or may not be a real problem: it depends on the
2009 permissions policy used on this particular system. This failure can
2010 also happen if the system either doesn't support the sticky bit (this
2011 is the case with many non-UNIX platforms: in principle File::Temp
2012 should know about these platforms and skip the tests), or if the system
2013 supports the sticky bit but for some reason or reasons it is not being
2014 used. This is, for example, the case with HP-UX: as of HP-UX release
2015 11.00, the sticky bit is very much supported, but HP-UX doesn't use it
2016 on its /tmp directory as shipped. Also, as with the permissions, some
2017 local policy might dictate that the stickiness is not used.
2019 (3) If the system supports the POSIX 'chown giveaway' feature and if
2020 any of the parent directories of the temporary file back to the root
2021 directory are 'unsafe', using the definitions given above in (1) and
2022 (2). For Unix systems, this is usually not an issue if you are
2023 building on a local disk. See the documentation for the File::Temp
2024 module for more information about 'chown giveaway'.
2026 See the documentation for the File::Temp module for more information
2027 about the various security aspects of temporary files.
2031 The core distribution can now run its regression tests in parallel on
2032 Unix-like platforms. Instead of running C<make test>, set C<TEST_JOBS> in
2033 your environment to the number of tests to run in parallel, and run
2034 C<make test_harness>. On a Bourne-like shell, this can be done as
2036 TEST_JOBS=3 make test_harness # Run 3 tests in parallel
2038 An environment variable is used, rather than parallel make itself, because
2039 L<TAP::Harness> needs to be able to schedule individual non-conflicting test
2040 scripts itself, and there is no standard interface to C<make> utilities to
2041 interact with their job schedulers.
2045 This will put perl into the public directory you specified to
2046 Configure; by default this is /usr/local/bin. It will also try
2047 to put the man pages in a reasonable place. It will not nroff the man
2048 pages, however. You may need to be root to run B<make install>. If you
2049 are not root, you must still have permission to install into the directories
2050 in question and you should ignore any messages about chown not working.
2052 If "make install" just says "'install' is up to date" or something
2053 similar, you may be on a case-insensitive filesystems such as Mac's HFS+,
2054 and you should say "make install-all". (This confusion is brought to you
2055 by the Perl distribution having a file called INSTALL.)
2057 =head2 Installing perl under different names
2059 If you want to install perl under a name other than "perl" (for example,
2060 when installing perl with special features enabled, such as debugging),
2061 indicate the alternate name on the "make install" line, such as:
2063 make install PERLNAME=myperl
2065 You can separately change the base used for versioned names (like
2066 "perl5.8.9") by setting PERLNAME_VERBASE, like
2068 make install PERLNAME=perl5 PERLNAME_VERBASE=perl
2070 This can be useful if you have to install perl as "perl5" (e.g. to
2071 avoid conflicts with an ancient version in /usr/bin supplied by your vendor).
2072 Without this the versioned binary would be called "perl55.8.8".
2074 =head2 Installing perl under a different directory
2076 You can install perl under a different destination directory by using
2077 the DESTDIR variable during C<make install>, with a command like
2079 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/perl5
2081 DESTDIR is automatically prepended to all the installation paths. See
2082 the example in L<"DESTDIR"> above.
2084 =head2 Installed files
2086 If you want to see exactly what will happen without installing
2087 anything, you can run
2089 ./perl installperl -n
2090 ./perl installman -n
2092 make install will install the following:
2097 perl5.n.n where 5.n.n is the current release number. This
2098 will be a link to perl.
2099 a2p awk-to-perl translator.
2103 cppstdin This is used by the deprecated switch perl -P,
2104 if your cc -E can't read from stdin.
2105 c2ph, pstruct Scripts for handling C structures in header
2107 config_data Manage Module::Build-like module configuration.
2108 corelist Shows versions of modules that come with
2111 cpan The CPAN shell.
2112 cpan2dist The CPANPLUS distribution creator.
2113 cpanp The CPANPLUS shell.
2114 cpanp-run-perl A helper for cpanp.
2115 enc2xs Encoding module generator.
2116 find2perl find-to-perl translator.
2117 h2ph Extract constants and simple macros from C
2119 h2xs Converts C .h header files to Perl extensions.
2120 instmodsh A shell to examine installed modules.
2121 libnetcfg Configure libnet.
2122 perlbug Tool to report bugs in Perl.
2123 perldoc Tool to read perl's pod documentation.
2124 perlivp Perl Installation Verification Procedure.
2125 piconv A Perl implementation of the encoding conversion
2127 pl2pm Convert Perl 4 .pl files to Perl 5 .pm modules.
2128 pod2html, Converters from perl's pod documentation format
2129 pod2latex, to other useful formats.
2133 podchecker POD syntax checker.
2134 podselect Prints sections of POD documentation.
2135 prove A command-line tool for running tests.
2136 psed A Perl implementation of sed.
2137 ptar A Perl implementation of tar.
2138 ptardiff A diff for tar archives.
2139 ptargrep A grep for tar archives.
2140 s2p sed-to-perl translator.
2141 shasum A tool to print or check SHA checksums.
2142 splain Describe Perl warnings and errors.
2143 xsubpp Compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.
2144 zipdetails display the internal structure of zip files
2148 in $privlib and $archlib specified to
2149 Configure, usually under /usr/local/lib/perl5/.
2153 man pages in $man1dir, usually /usr/local/man/man1.
2155 pages in $man3dir, usually /usr/local/man/man3.
2156 pod/*.pod in $privlib/pod/.
2158 installperl will also create the directories listed above
2159 in L<"Installation Directories">.
2161 Perl's *.h header files and the libperl library are also installed
2162 under $archlib so that any user may later build new modules, run the
2163 optional Perl compiler, or embed the perl interpreter into another
2164 program even if the Perl source is no longer available.
2166 =head2 Installing only version-specific parts
2168 Sometimes you only want to install the version-specific parts of the perl
2169 installation. For example, you may wish to install a newer version of
2170 perl alongside an already installed production version without
2171 disabling installation of new modules for the production version.
2172 To only install the version-specific parts of the perl installation, run
2174 Configure -Dversiononly
2176 or answer 'y' to the appropriate Configure prompt. Alternatively,
2177 you can just manually run
2179 ./perl installperl -v
2181 and skip installman altogether.
2183 See also L<"Maintaining completely separate versions"> for another
2186 =head1 cd /usr/include; h2ph *.h sys/*.h
2188 Some perl scripts need to be able to obtain information from the
2189 system header files. This command will convert the most commonly used
2190 header files in /usr/include into files that can be easily interpreted
2191 by perl. These files will be placed in the architecture-dependent
2192 library ($archlib) directory you specified to Configure.
2194 Note: Due to differences in the C and perl languages, the conversion
2195 of the header files is not perfect. You will probably have to
2196 hand-edit some of the converted files to get them to parse correctly.
2197 For example, h2ph breaks spectacularly on type casting and certain
2200 =head1 installhtml --help
2202 Some sites may wish to make perl documentation available in HTML
2203 format. The installhtml utility can be used to convert pod
2204 documentation into linked HTML files and install them.
2206 Currently, the supplied ./installhtml script does not make use of the
2207 html Configure variables. This should be fixed in a future release.
2209 The following command-line is an example of one used to convert
2214 --podpath=lib:ext:pod:vms \
2216 --htmldir=/perl/nmanual \
2217 --htmlroot=/perl/nmanual \
2218 --splithead=pod/perlipc \
2219 --splititem=pod/perlfunc \
2222 See the documentation in installhtml for more details. It can take
2223 many minutes to execute a large installation and you should expect to
2224 see warnings like "no title", "unexpected directive" and "cannot
2225 resolve" as the files are processed. We are aware of these problems
2226 (and would welcome patches for them).
2228 You may find it helpful to run installhtml twice. That should reduce
2229 the number of "cannot resolve" warnings.
2231 =head1 cd pod && make tex && (process the latex files)
2233 Some sites may also wish to make the documentation in the pod/ directory
2234 available in TeX format. Type
2236 (cd pod && make tex && <process the latex files>)
2238 =head1 Starting all over again
2240 If you wish to rebuild perl from the same build directory, you should
2241 clean it out with the command
2249 The only difference between the two is that make distclean also removes
2250 your old config.sh and Policy.sh files.
2252 If you are upgrading from a previous version of perl, or if you
2253 change systems or compilers or make other significant changes, or if
2254 you are experiencing difficulties building perl, you should not reuse
2257 If your reason to reuse your old config.sh is to save your particular
2258 installation choices, then you can probably achieve the same effect by
2259 using the Policy.sh file. See the section on L<"Site-wide Policy
2262 =head1 Reporting Problems
2264 Wherever possible please use the perlbug tool supplied with this Perl
2265 to report problems, as it automatically includes summary configuration
2266 information about your perl, which may help us track down problems far
2267 more quickly. But first you should read the advice in this file,
2268 carefully re-read the error message and check the relevant manual pages
2269 on your system, as these may help you find an immediate solution. If
2270 you are not sure whether what you are seeing is a bug, you can send a
2271 message describing the problem to the comp.lang.perl.misc newsgroup to
2274 The perlbug tool is installed along with perl, so after you have
2275 completed C<make install> it should be possible to run it with plain
2276 C<perlbug>. If the install fails, or you want to report problems with
2277 C<make test> without installing perl, then you can use C<make nok> to
2278 run perlbug to report the problem, or run it by hand from this source
2279 directory with C<./perl -Ilib utils/perlbug>
2281 If the build fails too early to run perlbug uninstalled, then please
2282 B<run> the C<./myconfig> shell script, and mail its output along with
2283 an accurate description of your problem to perlbug@perl.org
2285 If Configure itself fails, and does not generate a config.sh file
2286 (needed to run C<./myconfig>), then please mail perlbug@perl.org the
2287 description of how Configure fails along with details of your system
2288 -- for example the output from running C<uname -a>
2290 Please try to make your message brief but clear. Brief, clear bug
2291 reports tend to get answered more quickly. Please don't worry if your
2292 written English is not great -- what matters is how well you describe
2293 the important technical details of the problem you have encountered,
2294 not whether your grammar and spelling is flawless.
2296 Trim out unnecessary information. Do not include large files (such as
2297 config.sh or a complete Configure or make log) unless absolutely
2298 necessary. Do not include a complete transcript of your build
2299 session. Just include the failing commands, the relevant error
2300 messages, and whatever preceding commands are necessary to give the
2301 appropriate context. Plain text should usually be sufficient -- fancy
2302 attachments or encodings may actually reduce the number of people who
2303 read your message. Your message will get relayed to over 400
2304 subscribers around the world so please try to keep it brief but clear.
2306 If the bug you are reporting has security implications, which make it
2307 inappropriate to send to a publicly archived mailing list, then please send
2308 it to perl5-security-report@perl.org. This points to a closed subscription
2309 unarchived mailing list, which includes all the core committers, who be able
2310 to help assess the impact of issues, figure out a resolution, and help
2311 co-ordinate the release of patches to mitigate or fix the problem across all
2312 platforms on which Perl is supported. Please only use this address for security
2313 issues in the Perl core, not for modules independently distributed on CPAN.
2315 If you are unsure what makes a good bug report please read "How to
2316 report Bugs Effectively" by Simon Tatham:
2317 http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
2319 =head1 Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5
2321 Perl 5.17.10 is not binary compatible with earlier versions of Perl.
2322 In other words, you will have to recompile your XS modules.
2324 In general, you can usually safely upgrade from one version of Perl (e.g.
2325 5.X.Y) to another similar minor version (e.g. 5.X.(Y+1))) without
2326 re-compiling all of your extensions. You can also safely leave the old
2327 version around in case the new version causes you problems for some reason.
2329 Usually, most extensions will probably not need to be recompiled to be
2330 used with a newer version of Perl. Here is how it is supposed to work.
2331 (These examples assume you accept all the Configure defaults.)
2333 Suppose you already have version 5.8.7 installed. The directories
2334 searched by 5.8.7 are typically like:
2336 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7/$archname
2337 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.7
2338 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/$archname
2339 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2341 Now, suppose you install version 5.8.8. The directories
2342 searched by version 5.8.8 will be:
2344 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8/$archname
2345 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.8
2346 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/$archname
2347 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
2349 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/$archname
2350 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2351 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
2353 Notice the last three entries -- Perl understands the default structure
2354 of the $sitelib directories and will look back in older, compatible
2355 directories. This way, modules installed under 5.8.7 will continue
2356 to be usable by 5.8.7 but will also accessible to 5.8.8. Further,
2357 suppose that you upgrade a module to one which requires features
2358 present only in 5.8.8. That new module will get installed into
2359 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8 and will be available to 5.8.8,
2360 but will not interfere with the 5.8.7 version.
2362 The last entry, /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/, is there so that
2363 5.6.0 and above will look for 5.004-era pure perl modules.
2365 Lastly, suppose you now install 5.10.0, which is not binary compatible
2366 with 5.8.x. The directories searched by 5.10.0 (if you don't change the
2367 Configure defaults) will be:
2369 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0/$archname
2370 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.10.0
2371 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0/$archname
2372 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.10.0
2374 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8
2376 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7
2378 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/
2380 Note that the earlier $archname entries are now gone, but pure perl
2381 modules from earlier versions will still be found.
2383 This way, you can choose to share compatible extensions, but also upgrade
2384 to a newer version of an extension that may be incompatible with earlier
2385 versions, without breaking the earlier versions' installations.
2387 =head2 Maintaining completely separate versions
2389 Many users prefer to keep all versions of perl in completely
2390 separate directories. This guarantees that an update to one version
2391 won't interfere with another version. (The defaults guarantee this for
2392 libraries after 5.6.0, but not for executables. TODO?) One convenient
2393 way to do this is by using a separate prefix for each version, such as
2395 sh Configure -Dprefix=/opt/perl5.17.10
2397 and adding /opt/perl5.17.10/bin to the shell PATH variable. Such users
2398 may also wish to add a symbolic link /usr/local/bin/perl so that
2399 scripts can still start with #!/usr/local/bin/perl.
2401 Others might share a common directory for maintenance sub-versions
2402 (e.g. 5.10 for all 5.10.x versions), but change directory with
2405 If you are installing a development subversion, you probably ought to
2406 seriously consider using a separate directory, since development
2407 subversions may not have all the compatibility wrinkles ironed out
2410 =head2 Upgrading from 5.17.8 or earlier
2412 B<Perl 5.17.10 may not be binary compatible with Perl 5.17.8 or
2413 earlier Perl releases.> Perl modules having binary parts
2414 (meaning that a C compiler is used) will have to be recompiled to be
2415 used with 5.17.10. If you find you do need to rebuild an extension with
2416 5.17.10, you may safely do so without disturbing the older
2417 installations. (See L<"Coexistence with earlier versions of perl 5">
2420 See your installed copy of the perllocal.pod file for a (possibly
2421 incomplete) list of locally installed modules. Note that you want
2422 perllocal.pod, not perllocale.pod, for installed module information.
2424 =head1 Minimizing the Perl installation
2426 The following section is meant for people worrying about squeezing the
2427 Perl installation into minimal systems (for example when installing
2428 operating systems, or in really small filesystems).
2430 Leaving out as many extensions as possible is an obvious way:
2431 Encode, with its big conversion tables, consumes a lot of
2432 space. On the other hand, you cannot throw away everything. The
2433 Fcntl module is pretty essential. If you need to do network
2434 programming, you'll appreciate the Socket module, and so forth: it all
2435 depends on what do you need to do.
2437 In the following we offer two different slimmed down installation
2438 recipes. They are informative, not normative: the choice of files
2439 depends on what you need.
2441 Firstly, the bare minimum to run this script
2445 foreach my $f (</*>) {
2449 in Linux with perl-5.17.10 is as follows (under $Config{prefix}):
2452 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/strict.pm
2453 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/warnings.pm
2454 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/i686-linux/File/Glob.pm
2455 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/feature.pm
2456 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/XSLoader.pm
2457 ./lib/perl5/5.17.10/i686-linux/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
2459 Secondly, for perl-5.10.1, the Debian perl-base package contains 591 files,
2460 (of which 510 are for lib/unicore) totaling about 3.5MB in its i386 version.
2461 Omitting the lib/unicore/* files for brevity, the remaining files are:
2465 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config.pm
2466 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config_git.pl
2467 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Config_heavy.pl
2468 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Cwd.pm
2469 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/DynaLoader.pm
2470 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Errno.pm
2471 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Fcntl.pm
2472 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/File/Glob.pm
2473 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Hash/Util.pm
2474 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO.pm
2475 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/File.pm
2476 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Handle.pm
2477 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Pipe.pm
2478 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Seekable.pm
2479 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Select.pm
2480 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket.pm
2481 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket/INET.pm
2482 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/IO/Socket/UNIX.pm
2483 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/List/Util.pm
2484 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/POSIX.pm
2485 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Scalar/Util.pm
2486 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/Socket.pm
2487 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/XSLoader.pm
2488 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Cwd/Cwd.so
2489 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/autosplit.ix
2490 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_expandspec.al
2491 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_find_symbol_anywhere.al
2492 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/DynaLoader/dl_findfile.al
2493 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Fcntl/Fcntl.so
2494 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/File/Glob/Glob.so
2495 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Hash/Util/Util.so
2496 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/IO/IO.so
2497 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/List/Util/Util.so
2498 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/POSIX.so
2499 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/autosplit.ix
2500 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/POSIX/load_imports.al
2501 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/auto/Socket/Socket.so
2502 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/lib.pm
2503 /usr/lib/perl/5.10.1/re.pm
2504 /usr/share/doc/perl/AUTHORS.gz
2505 /usr/share/doc/perl/Documentation
2506 /usr/share/doc/perl/README.Debian
2507 /usr/share/doc/perl/changelog.Debian.gz
2508 /usr/share/doc/perl/copyright
2509 /usr/share/lintian/overrides/perl-base
2510 /usr/share/man/man1/perl.1.gz
2511 /usr/share/man/man1/perl5.10.1.1.gz
2512 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/AutoLoader.pm
2513 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Carp.pm
2514 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Carp/Heavy.pm
2515 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Exporter.pm
2516 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Exporter/Heavy.pm
2517 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/File/Spec.pm
2518 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/File/Spec/Unix.pm
2519 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/FileHandle.pm
2520 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Getopt/Long.pm
2521 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/IPC/Open2.pm
2522 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/IPC/Open3.pm
2523 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/SelectSaver.pm
2524 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Symbol.pm
2525 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/ParseWords.pm
2526 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/Tabs.pm
2527 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Text/Wrap.pm
2528 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/Tie/Hash.pm
2529 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/attributes.pm
2530 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/base.pm
2531 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/bytes.pm
2532 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/bytes_heavy.pl
2533 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/constant.pm
2534 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/fields.pm
2535 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/integer.pm
2536 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/locale.pm
2537 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/overload.pm
2538 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/strict.pm
2539 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/unicore/*
2540 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/utf8.pm
2541 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/utf8_heavy.pl
2542 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/vars.pm
2543 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/warnings.pm
2544 /usr/share/perl/5.10.1/warnings/register.pm
2546 A nice trick to find out the minimal set of Perl library files you will
2547 need to run a Perl program is
2549 perl -e 'do "prog.pl"; END { print "$_\n" for sort keys %INC }'
2551 (this will not find libraries required in runtime, unfortunately, but
2552 it's a minimal set) and if you want to find out all the files you can
2553 use something like the below
2555 strace perl -le 'do "x.pl"' 2>&1 \
2556 | perl -nle '/^open\(\"(.+?)"/ && print $1'
2558 (The 'strace' is Linux-specific, other similar utilities include 'truss'
2561 =head2 C<-DNO_MATHOMS>
2563 If you configure perl with C<-Accflags=-DNO_MATHOMS>, the functions from
2564 F<mathoms.c> will not be compiled in. Those functions are no longer used
2565 by perl itself; for source compatibility reasons, though, they weren't
2568 =head1 DOCUMENTATION
2570 Read the manual entries before running perl. The main documentation
2571 is in the pod/ subdirectory and should have been installed during the
2572 build process. Type B<man perl> to get started. Alternatively, you
2573 can type B<perldoc perl> to use the supplied perldoc script. This is
2574 sometimes useful for finding things in the library modules.
2578 Original author: Andy Dougherty doughera@lafayette.edu , borrowing very
2579 heavily from the original README by Larry Wall, with lots of helpful
2580 feedback and additions from the perl5-porters@perl.org folks.
2582 If you have problems, corrections, or questions, please see
2583 L<"Reporting Problems"> above.
2585 =head1 REDISTRIBUTION
2587 This document is part of the Perl package and may be distributed under
2588 the same terms as perl itself, with the following additional request:
2589 If you are distributing a modified version of perl (perhaps as part of
2590 a larger package) please B<do> modify these installation instructions
2591 and the contact information to match your distribution.