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. =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 - Prerequisites - Getting the perl source - Application of the patches - Making - Testing - Installing the built perl AUTHOR SEE ALSO =head1 DESCRIPTION =head2 Prerequisites =over 6 =item B You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is B. For a minimum setup, get the following archives from ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current or a mirror: ixemul-46.0-bin.lha ixemul-46.0-env-bin.lha pdksh-4.9-bin.lha ADE-misc-bin.lha Note that there might be newer versions available by the time you read this. Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages of 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 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-5.003-bin.lha or tar xvzpf perl-5.003-bin.tgz (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.) For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs. =head1 Accessing documentation =head2 Manpages 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 B 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 B C files 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 C docs can be constructed using C. =head1 BUILD Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS. =head2 Prerequisites You need to have the latest B (Amiga Developers Environment) from ftp://ftp.ninemoons.com/pub/ade/current. Also, you need a lot of free memory, probably at least 8MB. =head2 Getting the perl source You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and extract it with: tar xvzpf perl-5.004-src.tgz or get the official source from CPAN: http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/5.0 Extract it like this tar xvzpf perl5.004.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 sh configure.gnu --prefix=/ade Now make =head2 Testing 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 Run make install =head1 AUTHOR Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de =head1 SEE ALSO perl(1). =cut