This is a fully ported perl for OS/390 Release 3. It may work on other versions, but that's the one we've tested it on. If you've downloaded the binary distribution, it needs to be installed below /usr/local. Source code distributions have an automated `make install` step that means you do not need to extract the source code below /usr/local (though that is where it will be installed by default). You may need to worry about the networking configuration files discussed in the last bullet below. Gunzip/gzip for OS/390 is discussed at: http://www.s390.ibm.com/products/oe/bpxqp1.html to extract an ASCII tar archive on OS/390, try this: pax -o to=IBM-1047,from=ISO8859-1 -r < latest.tar GNU make for OS/390, which may be required for the build of perl, is available from: http://www.mks.com/s390/gnu/index.htm Once you've unpacked the distribution, run Configure (see INSTALL for full discussion of the Configure options), and then run make, then "make test" then "make install" (this last step may require UID=0 privileges) There is a "hints" file for os390 that specifies the correct values for most things. Some things to watch out for are - this port doesn't support dynamic loading. Although OS/390 has support for DLLs, there are some differences that cause problems for perl. - You may see a "WHOA THERE!!!" message for $d_shmatprototype it is OK to keep the recommended "define". - Don't turn on the compiler optimization flag "-O". There's a bug in either the optimizer or perl that causes perl to not work correctly when the optimizer is on. - Some of the configuration files in /etc used by the networking APIs are either missing or have the wrong names. In particular, make sure that there's either an /etc/resolv.conf or and /etc/hosts, so that gethostbyname() works, and make sure that the file /etc/proto has been renamed to /etc/protocol (NOT /etc/protocols, as used by other Unix systems). - Some of the parser default files in /sample are needed in /etc. In particular be sure that you at least copy /sample/yy* to /etc before running perl's Configure. When using perl on OS/390 please keep in mind that the EBCDIC and ASCII character sets are different. Perl builtin functions that may behave differently under EBCDIC are mentioned in the perlport.pod document. OpenEdition (UNIX System Services) does not (yet) support the #! means of script invokation. See: head `whence perldoc` for an example of how to use the "eval exec" trick to ask the shell to have perl run your scripts for you. perl-mvs mailing list: The Perl Institute (http://www.perl.org/) maintains a mailing list of interest to all folks building and/or using perl on EBCDIC platforms. To subscibe, send a message of: subscribe perl-mvs to majordomo@perl.org. Regression tests: as the 5.005 kit was was being assembled the following "failures" were known to appear on some machines during `make test` (mostly due to ASCII vs. EBCDIC conflicts), your results may differ: comp/cpp..........FAILED at test 0 op/pack...........FAILED at test 58 op/stat...........Out of memory! op/taint..........FAILED at test 73 lib/errno.........FAILED at test 1 lib/posix.........FAILED at test 19