SYNOPSIS

       perl [ -sTuU ] [ -hv ] [ -V[:configvar] ]
           [ -cw ] [ -d[:debugger] ] [ -D[number/list] ]
           [ -pna ] [ -Fpattern ] [ -l[octal] ] [ -0[octal] ]
           [ -Idir ] [ -m[-]module ] [ -M[-]'module...' ]
           [ -P ] [ -S ] [ -x[dir] ]
           [ -i[extension] ] [ -e 'command' ] [ -- ] [ program­
       file ] [ argument ]...

       If you're new to Perl, you should start with perlintro,
       which is a general intro for beginners and provides some
       background to help you navigate the rest of Perl's exten­
       sive documentation.

       For ease of access, the Perl manual has been split up into
       several sections.

       Overview

           perl                Perl overview (this section)
           perlintro           Perl introduction for beginners
           perltoc             Perl documentation table of contents

       Tutorials

           perlreftut          Perl references short introduction
           perldsc             Perl data structures intro
           perllol             Perl data structures: arrays of arrays

           perlrequick         Perl regular expressions quick start
           perlretut           Perl regular expressions tutorial

           perlboot            Perl OO tutorial for beginners
           perltoot            Perl OO tutorial, part 1
           perltooc            Perl OO tutorial, part 2
           perlbot             Perl OO tricks and examples

           perlstyle           Perl style guide

           perltrap            Perl traps for the unwary
           perldebtut          Perl debugging tutorial

           perlfaq             Perl frequently asked questions
             perlfaq1          General Questions About Perl
             perlfaq2          Obtaining and Learning about Perl
             perlfaq3          Programming Tools
             perlfaq4          Data Manipulation
             perlfaq5          Files and Formats
             perlfaq6          Regexes
             perlfaq7          Perl Language Issues
             perlfaq8          System Interaction
             perlfaq9          Networking

           perlpod             Perl plain old documentation
           perlpodspec         Perl plain old documentation format specification
           perlrun             Perl execution and options
           perldiag            Perl diagnostic messages
           perllexwarn         Perl warnings and their control
           perldebug           Perl debugging
           perlvar             Perl predefined variables
           perlre              Perl regular expressions, the rest of the story
           perlref             Perl references, the rest of the story
           perlform            Perl formats
           perlobj             Perl objects
           perltie             Perl objects hidden behind simple variables
             perldbmfilter     Perl DBM filters

           perlipc             Perl interprocess communication
           perlfork            Perl fork() information
           perlnumber          Perl number semantics

           perlthrtut          Perl threads tutorial
             perlothrtut         Old Perl threads tutorial

           perlport            Perl portability guide
           perllocale          Perl locale support
           perluniintro        Perl Unicode introduction
           perlunicode         Perl Unicode support
           perlebcdic          Considerations for running Perl on EBCDIC platforms

           perlsec             Perl security

           perlmod             Perl modules: how they work
           perlmodlib          Perl modules: how to write and use
           perlmodstyle        Perl modules: how to write modules with style
           perlmodinstall      Perl modules: how to install from CPAN
           perlnewmod          Perl modules: preparing a new module for distribution

           perlutil            utilities packaged with the Perl distribution

           perlcompile         Perl compiler suite intro

           perlfilter          Perl source filters

       Internals and C Language Interface

           perlembed           Perl ways to embed perl in your C or C++ application
           perldebguts         Perl debugging guts and tips
           perlxstut           Perl XS tutorial
           perlxs              Perl XS application programming interface
           perlclib            Internal replacements for standard C library functions
           perlguts            Perl internal functions for those doing extensions
           perlcall            Perl calling conventions from C

           perlapi             Perl API listing (autogenerated)
           perldelta           Perl changes since previous version
           perl572delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.2
           perl571delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.1
           perl570delta        Perl changes in version 5.7.0
           perl561delta        Perl changes in version 5.6.1
           perl56delta         Perl changes in version 5.6
           perl5005delta       Perl changes in version 5.005
           perl5004delta       Perl changes in version 5.004

       Language-Specific

           perlcn              Perl for Simplified Chinese (in EUC-CN)
           perljp              Perl for Japanese (in EUC-JP)
           perlko              Perl for Korean (in EUC-KR)
           perltw              Perl for Traditional Chinese (in Big5)

       Platform-Specific

           perlaix             Perl notes for AIX
           perlamiga           Perl notes for AmigaOS
           perlapollo          Perl notes for Apollo DomainOS
           perlbeos            Perl notes for BeOS
           perlbs2000          Perl notes for POSIX-BC BS2000
           perlce              Perl notes for WinCE
           perlcygwin          Perl notes for Cygwin
           perldgux            Perl notes for DG/UX
           perldos             Perl notes for DOS
           perlepoc            Perl notes for EPOC
           perlfreebsd         Perl notes for FreeBSD
           perlhpux            Perl notes for HP-UX
           perlhurd            Perl notes for Hurd
           perlirix            Perl notes for Irix
           perlmachten         Perl notes for Power MachTen
           perlmacos           Perl notes for Mac OS (Classic)
           perlmint            Perl notes for MiNT
           perlmpeix           Perl notes for MPE/iX
           perlnetware         Perl notes for NetWare
           perlos2             Perl notes for OS/2
           perlos390           Perl notes for OS/390
           perlplan9           Perl notes for Plan 9
           perlqnx             Perl notes for QNX
           perlsolaris         Perl notes for Solaris
           perltru64           Perl notes for Tru64
           perluts             Perl notes for UTS
           perlvmesa           Perl notes for VM/ESA
           perlvms             Perl notes for VMS
           perlvos             Perl notes for Stratus VOS
           perlwin32           Perl notes for Windows

       By default, the manpages listed above are installed in the
       /usr/local/man/ directory.


           perl -V:man.dir

       If the directories have a common stem, such as
       /usr/local/man/man1 and /usr/local/man/man3, you need only
       to add that stem (/usr/local/man) to your man(1) configu­
       ration files or your MANPATH environment variable.  If
       they do not share a stem, you'll have to add both stems.

       If that doesn't work for some reason, you can still use
       the supplied perldoc script to view module information.
       You might also look into getting a replacement man pro­
       gram.

       If something strange has gone wrong with your program and
       you're not sure where you should look for help, try the -w
       switch first.  It will often point out exactly where the
       trouble is.


DESCRIPTION

       Perl is a language optimized for scanning arbitrary text
       files, extracting information from those text files, and
       printing reports based on that information.  It's also a
       good language for many system management tasks.  The lan­
       guage is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient,
       complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal).

       Perl combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of
       the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people famil­
       iar with those languages should have little difficulty
       with it.  (Language historians will also note some ves­
       tiges of csh, Pascal, and even BASIC-PLUS.)  Expression
       syntax corresponds closely to C expression syntax.  Unlike
       most Unix utilities, Perl does not arbitrarily limit the
       size of your data--if you've got the memory, Perl can
       slurp in your whole file as a single string.  Recursion is
       of unlimited depth.  And the tables used by hashes (some­
       times called "associative arrays") grow as necessary to
       prevent degraded performance.  Perl can use sophisticated
       pattern matching techniques to scan large amounts of data
       quickly.  Although optimized for scanning text, Perl can
       also deal with binary data, and can make dbm files look
       like hashes.  Setuid Perl scripts are safer than C pro­
       grams through a dataflow tracing mechanism that prevents
       many stupid security holes.

       If you have a problem that would ordinarily use sed or awk
       or sh, but it exceeds their capabilities or must run a
       little faster, and you don't want to write the silly thing
       in C, then Perl may be for you.  There are also transla­
       tors to turn your sed and awk scripts into Perl scripts.


       ·   roll-your-own magic variables (including multiple
           simultaneous DBM implementations)

           Described in perltie and AnyDBM_File.

       ·   subroutines can now be overridden, autoloaded, and
           prototyped

           Described in perlsub.

       ·   arbitrarily nested data structures and anonymous func­
           tions

           Described in perlreftut, perlref, perldsc, and perl­
           lol.

       ·   object-oriented programming

           Described in perlobj, perlboot, perltoot, perltooc,
           and perlbot.

       ·   compilability into C code or Perl bytecode

           Described in B and B::Bytecode.

       ·   support for light-weight processes (threads)

           Described in perlthrtut and Thread.

       ·   support for internationalization, localization, and
           Unicode

           Described in perllocale and utf8.

       ·   lexical scoping

           Described in perlsub.

       ·   regular expression enhancements

           Described in perlre, with additional examples in per­
           lop.

       ·   enhanced debugger and interactive Perl environment,
           with integrated editor support

           Described in perldebtut, perldebug and perldebguts.

       ·   POSIX 1003.1 compliant library

           Described in POSIX.

       If your Perl success stories and testimonials may be of
       help to others who wish to advocate the use of Perl in
       their applications, or if you wish to simply express your
       gratitude to Larry and the Perl developers, please write
       to perl-thanks@perl.org .


FILES

        "@INC"                 locations of perl libraries


SEE ALSO

        a2p    awk to perl translator
        s2p    sed to perl translator

        http://www.perl.com/       the Perl Home Page
        http://www.cpan.org/       the Comprehensive Perl Archive
        http://www.perl.org/       Perl Mongers (Perl user groups)


DIAGNOSTICS

       The "use warnings" pragma (and the -w switch) produces
       some lovely diagnostics.

       See perldiag for explanations of all Perl's diagnostics.
       The "use diagnostics" pragma automatically turns Perl's
       normally terse warnings and errors into these longer
       forms.

       Compilation errors will tell you the line number of the
       error, with an indication of the next token or token type
       that was to be examined.  (In a script passed to Perl via
       -e switches, each -e is counted as one line.)

       Setuid scripts have additional constraints that can pro­
       duce error messages such as "Insecure dependency".  See
       perlsec.

       Did we mention that you should definitely consider using
       the -w switch?


BUGS

       The -w switch is not mandatory.

       Perl is at the mercy of your machine's definitions of var­
       ious operations such as type casting, atof(), and float­
       ing-point output with sprintf().

       If your stdio requires a seek or eof between reads and
       writes on a particular stream, so does Perl.  (This
       doesn't apply to sysread() and syswrite().)

       While none of the built-in data types have any arbitrary
       size limits (apart from memory size), there are still a
       Lister, but don't tell anyone I said that.


NOTES

       The Perl motto is "There's more than one way to do it."
       Divining how many more is left as an exercise to the
       reader.

       The three principal virtues of a programmer are Laziness,
       Impatience, and Hubris.  See the Camel Book for why.



perl v5.8.0                 2002-06-08                    PERL(1)

Man(1) output converted with man2html