If you read this file _as_is_, just ignore the funny characters you see. It is written in the POD format (see perlpod manpage) which is specially designed to be readable as is. =head1 NAME perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS =head1 SYNOPSIS One can read this document in the following formats: man perlamiga multiview perlamiga.guide to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be read I: either as F, or F. A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets section of the Aminet: http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dirs/dev_gg.html =cut Contents perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS NAME SYNOPSIS DESCRIPTION - Prerequisites - Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS - Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS INSTALLATION Accessing documentation - Manpages - HTML - GNU info files - LaTeX docs BUILD - Build Prerequisites - Getting the perl source - Application of the patches - Making - Testing - Installing the built perl AUTHOR SEE ALSO =head1 DESCRIPTION =head2 Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS =over 6 =item B You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is B. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/): ixemul-bin ixemul-env-bin pdksh-bin Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages of B (the I). =item B You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is version 3.1. =back =head2 Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS Start your Perl program F with arguments C the same way as on any other platform, by perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3 If you want to specify perl options C<-my_opts> to the perl itself (as opposed to your program), use perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3 Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's B command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with foo arg1 arg2 arg3 (Note that having *nixish full path to perl F is not necessary, F would be enough, but having full path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.) =head2 Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably: =over 6 =item * fork() =item * some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates =item * inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file =item * umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is finally close()d =back =head1 INSTALLATION Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract the binary distribution: lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha or tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.) For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs. =head1 Accessing documentation =head2 Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS If you have C installed on your system, and you installed perl manpages, use something like this: man perlfunc man less man ExtUtils.MakeMaker to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with man perl Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl library will not be found. Note that dot (F<.>) is used as a package separator for documentation for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - C<3> above - to avoid shadowing by the I. =head2 Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS If you have some WWW browser available, you can build B docs. Cd to directory with F<.pod> files, and do like this cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod pod2html After this you can direct your browser the file F in this directory, and go ahead with reading docs. Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from C. =head2 Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS Users of C would appreciate it very much, especially with C mode loaded. You need to get latest C from C, or, alternately, prebuilt info pages. =head2 Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS Can be constructed using C. =head1 BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS. =head2 Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS You need to have the latest B (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet. =head2 Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and extract it with: tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz or get the official source from CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0 Extract it like this tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz You will see a message about errors while extracting F. This is normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file F, but it causes no harm.) =head2 Making Perl on AmigaOS Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000) sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg Now type make depend Now! make =head2 Testing Perl on AmigaOS Now run make test Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function: F, F, F, F, F, F, F =head2 Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS Run make install =head1 AUTHORS Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se =head1 SEE ALSO perl(1). =cut