PERLFUNC(C) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLFUNC(C) NAME perlfunc - Perl builtin functions DESCRIPTION The functions in this section can serve as terms in an expression. They fall into two major categories: list operators and named unary operators. These differ in their precedence relationship with a following comma. (See the precedence table in perlop.) List operators take more than one argument, while unary operators can never take more than one argument. Thus, a comma terminates the argument of a unary operator, but merely separates the arguments of a list operator. A unary operator generally provides a scalar context to its argument, while a list operator may provide either scalar or list contexts for its arguments. If it does both, the scalar arguments will be first, and the list argument will follow. (Note that there can ever be only one such list argument.) For instance, splice() has three scalar arguments followed by a list, whereas gethostbyname() has four scalar arguments. In the syntax descriptions that follow, list operators that expect a list (and provide list context for the ele- ments of the list) are shown with LIST as an argument. Such a list may consist of any combination of scalar argu- ments or list values; the list values will be included in the list as if each individual element were interpolated at that point in the list, forming a longer single-dimen- sional list value. Elements of the LIST should be sepa- rated by commas. Any function in the list below may be used either with or without parentheses around its arguments. (The syntax descriptions omit the parentheses.) If you use the paren- theses, the simple (but occasionally surprising) rule is this: It looks like a function, therefore it is a func- tion, and precedence doesn't matter. Otherwise it's a list operator or unary operator, and precedence does mat- ter. And whitespace between the function and left paren- thesis doesn't count--so you need to be careful sometimes: print 1+2+4; # Prints 7. print(1+2) + 4; # Prints 3. print (1+2)+4; # Also prints 3! print +(1+2)+4; # Prints 7. print ((1+2)+4); # Prints 7. If you run Perl with the -w switch it can warn you about this. For example, the third line above produces: print (...) interpreted as function at - line 1. Useless use of integer addition in void context at - line 1. A few functions take no arguments at all, and therefore work as neither unary nor list operators. These include such functions as "time" and "endpwent". For example, "time+86_400" always means "time() + 86_400". For functions that can be used in either a scalar or list context, nonabortive failure is generally indicated in a scalar context by returning the undefined value, and in a list context by returning the null list. Remember the following important rule: There is no rule that relates the behavior of an expression in list context to its behavior in scalar context, or vice versa. It might do two totally different things. Each operator and function decides which sort of value it would be most appropriate to return in scalar context. Some operators return the length of the list that would have been returned in list context. Some operators return the first value in the list. Some operators return the last value in the list. Some operators return a count of successful operations. In general, they do what you want, unless you want consistency. An named array in scalar context is quite different from what would at first glance appear to be a list in scalar context. You can't get a list like "(1,2,3)" into being in scalar context, because the compiler knows the context at compile time. It would generate the scalar comma oper- ator there, not the list construction version of the comma. That means it was never a list to start with. In general, functions in Perl that serve as wrappers for system calls of the same name (like chown(n), fork(k), closedir(r), etc.) all return true when they succeed and "undef" otherwise, as is usually mentioned in the descrip- tions below. This is different from the C interfaces, which return "-1" on failure. Exceptions to this rule are "wait", "waitpid", and "syscall". System calls also set the special $! variable on failure. Other functions do not, except accidentally. Perl Functions by Category Here are Perl's functions (including things that look like functions, like some keywords and named operators) arranged by category. Some functions appear in more than one place. Functions for SCALARs or strings "chomp", "chop", "chr", "crypt", "hex", "index", "lc", "lcfirst", "length", "oct", "ord", "pack", "q/STRING/", "qq/STRING/", "reverse", "rindex", "sprintf", "substr", "tr///", "uc", "ucfirst", "y///" Regular expressions and pattern matching "m//", "pos", "quotemeta", "s///", "split", "study", "qr//" Numeric functions "abs", "atan2", "cos", "exp", "hex", "int", "log", "oct", "rand", "sin", "sqrt", "srand" Functions for real @ARRAYs "pop", "push", "shift", "splice", "unshift" Functions for list data "grep", "join", "map", "qw/STRING/", "reverse", "sort", "unpack" Functions for real %HASHes "delete", "each", "exists", "keys", "values" Input and output functions "binmode", "close", "closedir", "dbmclose", "dbmopen", "die", "eof", "fileno", "flock", "format", "getc", "print", "printf", "read", "readdir", "rewinddir", "seek", "seekdir", "select", "syscall", "sysread", "sysseek", "syswrite", "tell", "telldir", "truncate", "warn", "write" Functions for fixed length data or records "pack", "read", "syscall", "sysread", "syswrite", "unpack", "vec" Functions for filehandles, files, or directories "-X", "chdir", "chmod", "chown", "chroot", "fcntl", "glob", "ioctl", "link", "lstat", "mkdir", "open", "opendir", "readlink", "rename", "rmdir", "stat", "symlink", "umask", "unlink", "utime" Keywords related to the control flow of your perl program "caller", "continue", "die", "do", "dump", "eval", "exit", "goto", "last", "next", "redo", "return", "sub", "wantarray" Keywords related to scoping "caller", "import", "local", "my", "our", "package", "use" Miscellaneous functions "defined", "dump", "eval", "formline", "local", "my", "our", "reset", "scalar", "undef", "wantarray" Functions for processes and process groups "alarm", "exec", "fork", "getpgrp", "getppid", "get- priority", "kill", "pipe", "qx/STRING/", "setpgrp", "setpriority", "sleep", "system", "times", "wait", "waitpid" Keywords related to perl modules "do", "import", "no", "package", "require", "use" Keywords related to classes and object-orientedness "bless", "dbmclose", "dbmopen", "package", "ref", "tie", "tied", "untie", "use" Low-level socket functions "accept", "bind", "connect", "getpeername", "getsock- name", "getsockopt", "listen", "recv", "send", "set- sockopt", "shutdown", "socket", "socketpair" System V interprocess communication functions "msgctl", "msgget", "msgrcv", "msgsnd", "semctl", "semget", "semop", "shmctl", "shmget", "shmread", "shmwrite" Fetching user and group info "endgrent", "endhostent", "endnetent", "endpwent", "getgrent", "getgrgid", "getgrnam", "getlogin", "getp- went", "getpwnam", "getpwuid", "setgrent", "setpwent" Fetching network info "endprotoent", "endservent", "gethostbyaddr", "geth- ostbyname", "gethostent", "getnetbyaddr", "getnetby- name", "getnetent", "getprotobyname", "getprotobynum- ber", "getprotoent", "getservbyname", "getservbyport", "getservent", "sethostent", "setnetent", "setpro- toent", "setservent" Time-related functions "gmtime", "localtime", "time", "times" Functions new in perl5 "abs", "bless", "chomp", "chr", "exists", "formline", "glob", "import", "lc", "lcfirst", "map", "my", "no", "our", "prototype", "qx", "qw", "readline", "read- pipe", "ref", "sub*", "sysopen", "tie", "tied", "uc", "ucfirst", "untie", "use" * - "sub" was a keyword in perl4, but in perl5 it is an operator, which can be used in expressions. Functions obsoleted in perl5 "dbmclose", "dbmopen" Portability Perl was born in Unix and can therefore access all common Unix system calls. In non-Unix environments, the func- tionality of some Unix system calls may not be available, or details of the available functionality may differ slightly. The Perl functions affected by this are: "-X", "binmode", "chmod", "chown", "chroot", "crypt", "dbmclose", "dbmopen", "dump", "endgrent", "endhostent", "endnetent", "endprotoent", "endpwent", "endservent", "exec", "fcntl", "flock", "fork", "getgrent", "getgrgid", "gethostent", "getlogin", "getnetbyaddr", "getnetbyname", "getnetent", "getppid", "getprgp", "getpriority", "getpro- tobynumber", "getprotoent", "getpwent", "getpwnam", "getp- wuid", "getservbyport", "getservent", "getsockopt", "glob", "ioctl", "kill", "link", "lstat", "msgctl", "msgget", "msgrcv", "msgsnd", "open", "pipe", "readlink", "rename", "select", "semctl", "semget", "semop", "set- grent", "sethostent", "setnetent", "setpgrp", "setprior- ity", "setprotoent", "setpwent", "setservent", "setsock- opt", "shmctl", "shmget", "shmread", "shmwrite", "socket", "socketpair", "stat", "symlink", "syscall", "sysopen", "system", "times", "truncate", "umask", "unlink", "utime", "wait", "waitpid" For more information about the portability of these func- tions, see perlport and other available platform-specific documentation. Alphabetical Listing of Perl Functions -X FILEHANDLE -X EXPR -X A file test, where X is one of the letters listed below. This unary operator takes one argument, either a filename or a filehandle, and tests the associated file to see if something is true about it. If the argument is omitted, tests $_, except for "-t", which tests STDIN. Unless otherwise documented, it returns 1 for true and '' for false, or the undefined value if the file doesn't exist. Despite the funny names, precedence is the same as any other named unary operator, and the argument may be parenthesized like any other unary operator. The operator may be any of: -r File is readable by effective uid/gid. -w File is writable by effective uid/gid. -x File is executable by effective uid/gid. -o File is owned by effective uid. -R File is readable by real uid/gid. -W File is writable by real uid/gid. -X File is executable by real uid/gid. -O File is owned by real uid. -e File exists. -z File has zero size (is empty). -s File has nonzero size (returns size in bytes). -f File is a plain file. -d File is a directory. -l File is a symbolic link. -p File is a named pipe (FIFO), or Filehandle is a pipe. -S File is a socket. -b File is a block special file. -c File is a character special file. -t Filehandle is opened to a tty. -u File has setuid bit set. -g File has setgid bit set. -k File has sticky bit set. -T File is an ASCII text file. -B File is a "binary" file (opposite of -T). -M Age of file in days when script started. -A Same for access time. -C Same for inode change time. Example: while (<>) { chomp; next unless -f $_; # ignore specials #... } The interpretation of the file permission opera- tors "-r", "-R", "-w", "-W", "-x", and "-X" is by default based solely on the mode of the file and the uids and gids of the user. There may be other reasons you can't actually read, write, or execute the file. Such reasons may be for example network filesystem access controls, ACLs (access control lists), read-only filesystems, and unrecognized executable formats. Also note that, for the superuser on the local filesystems, the "-r", "-R", "-w", and "-W" tests always return 1, and "-x" and "-X" return 1 if any execute bit is set in the mode. Scripts run by the superuser may thus need to do a stat() to determine the actual mode of the file, or tem- porarily set their effective uid to something else. If you are using ACLs, there is a pragma called "filetest" that may produce more accurate results than the bare stat() mode bits. When under the "use filetest 'access'" the above-mentioned filetests will test whether the permission can (not) be granted using the access() family of sys- tem calls. Also note that the "-x" and "-X" may under this pragma return true even if there are no execute permission bits set (nor any extra execute permission ACLs). This strangeness is due to the underlying system calls' definitions. Read the documentation for the "filetest" pragma for more information. Note that "-s/a/b/" does not do a negated substi- tution. Saying "-exp($foo)" still works as expected, however--only single letters following a minus are interpreted as file tests. The "-T" and "-B" switches work as follows. The first block or so of the file is examined for odd characters such as strange control codes or char- acters with the high bit set. If too many strange characters (>30%) are found, it's a "-B" file, otherwise it's a "-T" file. Also, any file con- taining null in the first block is considered a binary file. If "-T" or "-B" is used on a file- handle, the current stdio buffer is examined rather than the first block. Both "-T" and "-B" return true on a null file, or a file at EOF when testing a filehandle. Because you have to read a file to do the "-T" test, on most occasions you want to use a "-f" against the file first, as in "next unless -f $file && -T $file". If any of the file tests (or either the "stat" or "lstat" operators) are given the special filehan- dle consisting of a solitary underline, then the stat structure of the previous file test (or stat operator) is used, saving a system call. (This doesn't work with "-t", and you need to remember that lstat() and "-l" will leave values in the stat structure for the symbolic link, not the real file.) Example: print "Can do.\n" if -r $a || -w _ || -x _; stat($filename); print "Readable\n" if -r _; print "Writable\n" if -w _; print "Executable\n" if -x _; print "Setuid\n" if -u _; print "Setgid\n" if -g _; print "Sticky\n" if -k _; print "Text\n" if -T _; print "Binary\n" if -B _; abs VALUE abs Returns the absolute value of its argument. If VALUE is omitted, uses $_. accept NEWSOCKET,GENERICSOCKET Accepts an incoming socket connect, just as the accept(t) system call does. Returns the packed address if it succeeded, false otherwise. See the example in "Sockets: Client/Server Communication" in perlipc. On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set for the newly opened file descriptor, as determined by the value of $^F. See "$^F" in perlvar. alarm SECONDS alarm Arranges to have a SIGALRM delivered to this pro- cess after the specified number of seconds have elapsed. If SECONDS is not specified, the value stored in $_ is used. (On some machines, unfortu- nately, the elapsed time may be up to one second less than you specified because of how seconds are counted.) Only one timer may be counting at once. Each call disables the previous timer, and an argument of 0 may be supplied to cancel the previ- ous timer without starting a new one. The returned value is the amount of time remaining on the previous timer. For delays of finer granularity than one second, you may use Perl's four-argument version of select() leaving the first three arguments unde- fined, or you might be able to use the "syscall" interface to access setitimer(r) if your system supports it. The Time::HiRes module from CPAN may also prove useful. It is usually a mistake to intermix "alarm" and "sleep" calls. ("sleep" may be internally imple- mented in your system with "alarm") If you want to use "alarm" to time out a system call you need to use an "eval"/"die" pair. You can't rely on the alarm causing the system call to fail with $! set to "EINTR" because Perl sets up signal handlers to restart system calls on some systems. Using "eval"/"die" always works, modulo the caveats given in "Signals" in perlipc. eval { local $SIG{ALRM} = sub { die "alarm\n" }; # NB: \n required alarm $timeout; $nread = sysread SOCKET, $buffer, $size; alarm 0; }; if ($@) { die unless $@ eq "alarm\n"; # propagate unexpected errors # timed out } else { # didn't } atan2 Y,X Returns the arctangent of Y/X in the range -PI to PI. For the tangent operation, you may use the "Math::Trig::tan" function, or use the familiar relation: sub tan { sin($_[0]) / cos($_[0]) } bind SOCKET,NAME Binds a network address to a socket, just as the bind system call does. Returns true if it suc- ceeded, false otherwise. NAME should be a packed address of the appropriate type for the socket. See the examples in "Sockets: Client/Server Commu- nication" in perlipc. binmode FILEHANDLE, DISCIPLINE binmode FILEHANDLE Arranges for FILEHANDLE to be read or written in "binary" or "text" mode on systems where the run- time libraries distinguish between binary and text files. If FILEHANDLE is an expression, the value is taken as the name of the filehandle. DISCI- PLINE can be either of ":raw" for binary mode or ":crlf" for "text" mode. If the DISCIPLINE is omitted, it defaults to ":raw". binmode() should be called after open() but before any I/O is done on the filehandle. On many systems binmode() currently has no effect, but in future, it will be extended to support user-defined input and output disciplines. On some systems binmode() is necessary when you're not working with a text file. For the sake of portability it is a good idea to always use it when appropriate, and to never use it when it isn't appropriate. In other words: Regardless of platform, use bin- mode() on binary files, and do not use binmode() on text files. The "open" pragma can be used to establish default disciplines. See open. The operating system, device drivers, C libraries, and Perl run-time system all work together to let the programmer treat a single character ("\n") as the line terminator, irrespective of the external representation. On many operating systems, the native text file representation matches the inter- nal representation, but on some platforms the external representation of "\n" is made up of more than one character. Mac OS and all variants of Unix use a single char- acter to end each line in the external representa- tion of text (even though that single character is not necessarily the same across these platforms). Consequently binmode() has no effect on these operating systems. In other systems like VMS, MS- DOS and the various flavors of MS-Windows your program sees a "\n" as a simple "\cJ", but what's stored in text files are the two characters "\cM\cJ". That means that, if you don't use bin- mode() on these systems, "\cM\cJ" sequences on disk will be converted to "\n" on input, and any "\n" in your program will be converted back to "\cM\cJ" on output. This is what you want for text files, but it can be disastrous for binary files. Another consequence of using binmode() (on some systems) is that special end-of-file markers will be seen as part of the data stream. For systems from the Microsoft family this means that if your binary data contains "\cZ", the I/O subsystem will regard it as the end of the file, unless you use binmode(). binmode() is not only important for readline() and print() operations, but also when using read(), seek(), sysread(), syswrite() and tell() (see perlport for more details). See the $/ and "$\" variables in perlvar for how to manually set your input and output line-termination sequences. bless REF,CLASSNAME bless REF This function tells the thingy referenced by REF that it is now an object in the CLASSNAME package. If CLASSNAME is omitted, the current package is used. Because a "bless" is often the last thing in a constructor, it returns the reference for convenience. Always use the two-argument version if the function doing the blessing might be inher- ited by a derived class. See perltoot and perlobj for more about the blessing (and blessings) of objects. Consider always blessing objects in CLASSNAMEs that are mixed case. Namespaces with all lower- case names are considered reserved for Perl prag- mata. Builtin types have all uppercase names, so to prevent confusion, you may wish to avoid such package names as well. Make sure that CLASSNAME is a true value. See "Perl Modules" in perlmod. caller EXPR caller Returns the context of the current subroutine call. In scalar context, returns the caller's package name if there is a caller, that is, if we're in a subroutine or "eval" or "require", and the undefined value otherwise. In list context, returns ($package, $filename, $line) = caller; With EXPR, it returns some extra information that the debugger uses to print a stack trace. The value of EXPR indicates how many call frames to go back before the current one. ($package, $filename, $line, $subroutine, $hasargs, $wantarray, $evaltext, $is_require, $hints, $bitmask) = caller($i); Here $subroutine may be "(eval)" if the frame is not a subroutine call, but an "eval". In such a case additional elements $evaltext and $is_require are set: $is_require is true if the frame is cre- ated by a "require" or "use" statement, $evaltext contains the text of the "eval EXPR" statement. In particular, for an "eval BLOCK" statement, $filename is "(eval)", but $evaltext is undefined. (Note also that each "use" statement creates a "require" frame inside an "eval EXPR") frame. $hasargs is true if a new instance of @_ was set up for the frame. $hints and $bitmask contain pragmatic hints that the caller was compiled with. The $hints and $bitmask values are subject to change between versions of Perl, and are not meant for external use. Furthermore, when called from within the DB package, caller returns more detailed information: it sets the list variable @DB::args to be the arguments with which the subroutine was invoked. Be aware that the optimizer might have optimized call frames away before "caller" had a chance to get the information. That means that caller(r) might not return information about the call frame you expect it do, for "N > 1". In particular, @DB::args might have information from the previous time "caller" was called. chdir EXPR Changes the working directory to EXPR, if possi- ble. If EXPR is omitted, changes to the directory specified by $ENV{HOME}, if set; if not, changes to the directory specified by $ENV{LOGDIR}. If neither is set, "chdir" does nothing. It returns true upon success, false otherwise. See the exam- ple under "die". chmod LIST Changes the permissions of a list of files. The first element of the list must be the numerical mode, which should probably be an octal number, and which definitely should not a string of octal digits: 0644 is okay, '0644' is not. Returns the number of files successfully changed. See also "oct", if all you have is a string. $cnt = chmod 0755, 'foo', 'bar'; chmod 0755, @executables; $mode = '0644'; chmod $mode, 'foo'; # !!! sets mode to # --w----r-T $mode = '0644'; chmod oct($mode), 'foo'; # this is better $mode = 0644; chmod $mode, 'foo'; # this is best You can also import the symbolic "S_I*" constants from the Fcntl module: use Fcntl ':mode'; chmod S_IRWXU|S_IRGRP|S_IXGRP|S_IROTH|S_IXOTH, @executables; # This is identical to the chmod 0755 of the above example. chomp VARIABLE chomp LIST chomp This safer version of "chop" removes any trailing string that corresponds to the current value of $/ (also known as $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR in the "English" module). It returns the total number of characters removed from all its arguments. It's often used to remove the newline from the end of an input record when you're worried that the final record may be missing its newline. When in para- graph mode ("$/ = """), it removes all trailing newlines from the string. When in slurp mode ("$/ = undef") or fixed-length record mode ($/ is a reference to an integer or the like, see perlvar) chomp() won't remove anything. If VARIABLE is omitted, it chomps $_. Example: while (<>) { chomp; # avoid \n on last field @array = split(/:/); # ... } If VARIABLE is a hash, it chomps the hash's val- ues, but not its keys. You can actually chomp anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment: chomp($cwd = `pwd`); chomp($answer = <STDIN>); If you chomp a list, each element is chomped, and the total number of characters removed is returned. chop VARIABLE chop LIST chop Chops off the last character of a string and returns the character chopped. It is much more efficient than "s/.$//s" because it neither scans nor copies the string. If VARIABLE is omitted, chops $_. If VARIABLE is a hash, it chops the hash's values, but not its keys. You can actually chop anything that's an lvalue, including an assignment. If you chop a list, each element is chopped. Only the value of the last "chop" is returned. Note that "chop" returns the last character. To return all but the last character, use "sub- str($string, 0, -1)". chown LIST Changes the owner (and group) of a list of files. The first two elements of the list must be the numeric uid and gid, in that order. A value of -1 in either position is interpreted by most systems to leave that value unchanged. Returns the number of files successfully changed. $cnt = chown $uid, $gid, 'foo', 'bar'; chown $uid, $gid, @filenames; Here's an example that looks up nonnumeric uids in the passwd file: print "User: "; chomp($user = <STDIN>); print "Files: "; chomp($pattern = <STDIN>); ($login,$pass,$uid,$gid) = getpwnam($user) or die "$user not in passwd file"; @ary = glob($pattern); # expand filenames chown $uid, $gid, @ary; On most systems, you are not allowed to change the ownership of the file unless you're the superuser, although you should be able to change the group to any of your secondary groups. On insecure sys- tems, these restrictions may be relaxed, but this is not a portable assumption. On POSIX systems, you can detect this condition this way: use POSIX qw(sysconf _PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED); $can_chown_giveaway = not sysconf(_PC_CHOWN_RESTRICTED); chr NUMBER chr Returns the character represented by that NUMBER in the character set. For example, "chr(r)" is "A" in either ASCII or Unicode, and chr(r) is a Unicode smiley face (but only within the scope of a "use utf8"). For the reverse, use "ord". See utf8 for more about Unicode. If NUMBER is omitted, uses $_. chroot FILENAME chroot This function works like the system call by the same name: it makes the named directory the new root directory for all further pathnames that begin with a "/" by your process and all its chil- dren. (It doesn't change your current working directory, which is unaffected.) For security reasons, this call is restricted to the superuser. If FILENAME is omitted, does a "chroot" to $_. close FILEHANDLE close Closes the file or pipe associated with the file handle, returning true only if stdio successfully flushes buffers and closes the system file descriptor. Closes the currently selected file- handle if the argument is omitted. You don't have to close FILEHANDLE if you are immediately going to do another "open" on it, because "open" will close it for you. (See "open".) However, an explicit "close" on an input file resets the line counter ($.), while the implicit close done by "open" does not. If the file handle came from a piped open "close" will additionally return false if one of the other system calls involved fails or if the program exits with non-zero status. (If the only problem was that the program exited non-zero $! will be set to 0.) Closing a pipe also waits for the pro- cess executing on the pipe to complete, in case you want to look at the output of the pipe after- wards, and implicitly puts the exit status value of that command into $?. Prematurely closing the read end of a pipe (i.e. before the process writing to it at the other end has closed it) will result in a SIGPIPE being delivered to the writer. If the other end can't handle that, be sure to read all the data before closing the pipe. Example: open(OUTPUT, '|sort >foo') # pipe to sort or die "Can't start sort: $!"; #... # print stuff to output close OUTPUT # wait for sort to finish or warn $! ? "Error closing sort pipe: $!" : "Exit status $? from sort"; open(INPUT, 'foo') # get sort's results or die "Can't open 'foo' for input: $!"; FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value can be used as an indirect filehandle, usually the real filehandle name. closedir DIRHANDLE Closes a directory opened by "opendir" and returns the success of that system call. DIRHANDLE may be an expression whose value can be used as an indirect dirhandle, usually the real dirhandle name. connect SOCKET,NAME Attempts to connect to a remote socket, just as the connect system call does. Returns true if it succeeded, false otherwise. NAME should be a packed address of the appropriate type for the socket. See the examples in "Sockets: Client/Server Communication" in perlipc. continue BLOCK Actually a flow control statement rather than a function. If there is a "continue" BLOCK attached to a BLOCK (typically in a "while" or "foreach"), it is always executed just before the conditional is about to be evaluated again, just like the third part of a "for" loop in C. Thus it can be used to increment a loop variable, even when the loop has been continued via the "next" statement (which is similar to the C "continue" statement). "last", "next", or "redo" may appear within a "continue" block. "last" and "redo" will behave as if they had been executed within the main block. So will "next", but since it will execute a "continue" block, it may be more entertaining. while (EXPR) { ### redo always comes here do_something; } continue { ### next always comes here do_something_else; # then back the top to re-check EXPR } ### last always comes here Omitting the "continue" section is semantically equivalent to using an empty one, logically enough. In that case, "next" goes directly back to check the condition at the top of the loop. cos EXPR cos Returns the cosine of EXPR (expressed in radians). If EXPR is omitted, takes cosine of $_. For the inverse cosine operation, you may use the "Math::Trig::acos()" function, or use this rela- tion: sub acos { atan2( sqrt(1 - $_[0] * $_[0]), $_[0] ) } crypt PLAINTEXT,SALT Encrypts a string exactly like the crypt(t) func- tion in the C library (assuming that you actually have a version there that has not been extirpated as a potential munition). This can prove useful for checking the password file for lousy pass- words, amongst other things. Only the guys wear- ing white hats should do this. Note that "crypt" is intended to be a one-way function, much like breaking eggs to make an omelette. There is no (known) corresponding decrypt function. As a result, this function isn't all that useful for cryptography. (For that, see your nearby CPAN mirror.) When verifying an existing encrypted string you should use the encrypted text as the salt (like "crypt($plain, $crypted) eq $crypted"). This allows your code to work with the standard "crypt" and with more exotic implementations. When choos- ing a new salt create a random two character string whose characters come from the set "[./0-9A-Za-z]" (like "join '', ('.', '/', 0..9, 'A'..'Z', 'a'..'z')[rand 64, rand 64]"). Here's an example that makes sure that whoever runs this program knows their own password: $pwd = (getpwuid($<))[1]; system "stty -echo"; print "Password: "; chomp($word = <STDIN>); print "\n"; system "stty echo"; if (crypt($word, $pwd) ne $pwd) { die "Sorry...\n"; } else { print "ok\n"; } Of course, typing in your own password to whoever asks you for it is unwise. The crypt function is unsuitable for encrypting large quantities of data, not least of all because you can't get the information back. Look at the by-module/Crypt and by-module/PGP directories on your favorite CPAN mirror for a slew of poten- tially useful modules. dbmclose HASH [This function has been largely superseded by the "untie" function.] Breaks the binding between a DBM file and a hash. dbmopen HASH,DBNAME,MASK [This function has been largely superseded by the "tie" function.] This binds a dbm(m), ndbm(m), sdbm(m), gdbm(m), or Berkeley DB file to a hash. HASH is the name of the hash. (Unlike normal "open", the first argu- ment is not a filehandle, even though it looks like one). DBNAME is the name of the database (without the .dir or .pag extension if any). If the database does not exist, it is created with protection specified by MASK (as modified by the "umask"). If your system supports only the older DBM functions, you may perform only one "dbmopen" in your program. In older versions of Perl, if your system had neither DBM nor ndbm, calling "dbmopen" produced a fatal error; it now falls back to sdbm(m). If you don't have write access to the DBM file, you can only read hash variables, not set them. If you want to test whether you can write, either use file tests or try setting a dummy hash entry inside an "eval", which will trap the error. Note that functions such as "keys" and "values" may return huge lists when used on large DBM files. You may prefer to use the "each" function to iterate over large DBM files. Example: # print out history file offsets dbmopen(%HIST,'/usr/lib/news/history',0666); while (($key,$val) = each %HIST) { print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n"; } dbmclose(%HIST); See also AnyDBM_File for a more general descrip- tion of the pros and cons of the various dbm approaches, as well as DB_File for a particularly rich implementation. You can control which DBM library you use by load- ing that library before you call dbmopen(): use DB_File; dbmopen(%NS_Hist, "$ENV{HOME}/.netscape/history.db") or die "Can't open netscape history file: $!"; defined EXPR defined Returns a Boolean value telling whether EXPR has a value other than the undefined value "undef". If EXPR is not present, $_ will be checked. Many operations return "undef" to indicate fail- ure, end of file, system error, uninitialized variable, and other exceptional conditions. This function allows you to distinguish "undef" from other values. (A simple Boolean test will not distinguish among "undef", zero, the empty string, and "0", which are all equally false.) Note that since "undef" is a valid scalar, its presence doesn't necessarily indicate an exceptional condi- tion: "pop" returns "undef" when its argument is an empty array, or when the element to return hap- pens to be "undef". You may also use "defined(&func)" to check whether subroutine &func has ever been defined. The return value is unaffected by any forward declara- tions of &foo. Note that a subroutine which is not defined may still be callable: its package may have an "AUTOLOAD" method that makes it spring into existence the first time that it is called -- see perlsub. Use of "defined" on aggregates (hashes and arrays) is deprecated. It used to report whether memory for that aggregate has ever been allocated. This behavior may disappear in future versions of Perl. You should instead use a simple test for size: if (@an_array) { print "has array elements\n" } if (%a_hash) { print "has hash members\n" } When used on a hash element, it tells you whether the value is defined, not whether the key exists in the hash. Use "exists" for the latter purpose. Examples: print if defined $switch{'D'}; print "$val\n" while defined($val = pop(@ary)); die "Can't readlink $sym: $!" unless defined($value = readlink $sym); sub foo { defined &$bar ? &$bar(@_) : die "No bar"; } $debugging = 0 unless defined $debugging; Note: Many folks tend to overuse "defined", and then are surprised to discover that the number 0 and "" (the zero-length string) are, in fact, defined values. For example, if you say "ab" =~ /a(.*)b/; The pattern match succeeds, and $1 is defined, despite the fact that it matched "nothing". But it didn't really match nothing--rather, it matched something that happened to be zero characters long. This is all very above-board and honest. When a function returns an undefined value, it's an admission that it couldn't give you an honest answer. So you should use "defined" only when you're questioning the integrity of what you're trying to do. At other times, a simple comparison to 0 or "" is what you want. See also "undef", "exists", "ref". delete EXPR Given an expression that specifies a hash element, array element, hash slice, or array slice, deletes the specified element(t) from the hash or array. In the case of an array, if the array elements happen to be at the end, the size of the array will shrink to the highest element that tests true for exists() (or 0 if no such element exists). Returns each element so deleted or the undefined value if there was no such element. Deleting from $ENV{} modifies the environment. Deleting from a hash tied to a DBM file deletes the entry from the DBM file. Deleting from a "tie"d hash or array may not necessarily return anything. Deleting an array element effectively returns that position of the array to its initial, uninitial- ized state. Subsequently testing for the same element with exists() will return false. Note that deleting array elements in the middle of an array will not shift the index of the ones after them down--use splice() for that. See "exists". The following (inefficiently) deletes all the val- ues of %HASH and @ARRAY: foreach $key (keys %HASH) { delete $HASH{$key}; } foreach $index (0 .. $#ARRAY) { delete $ARRAY[$index]; } And so do these: delete @HASH{keys %HASH}; delete @ARRAY[0 .. $#ARRAY]; But both of these are slower than just assigning the empty list or undefining %HASH or @ARRAY: %HASH = (); # completely empty %HASH undef %HASH; # forget %HASH ever existed @ARRAY = (); # completely empty @ARRAY undef @ARRAY; # forget @ARRAY ever existed Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final operation is a hash element, array element, hash slice, or array slice lookup: delete $ref->[$x][$y]{$key}; delete @{$ref->[$x][$y]}{$key1, $key2, @morekeys}; delete $ref->[$x][$y][$index]; delete @{$ref->[$x][$y]}[$index1, $index2, @moreindices]; die LIST Outside an "eval", prints the value of LIST to "STDERR" and exits with the current value of $! (errno). If $! is 0, exits with the value of "($? >> 8)" (backtick `command` status). If "($? >> 8)" is 0, exits with 255. Inside an "eval()," the error message is stuffed into $@ and the "eval" is terminated with the undefined value. This makes "die" the way to raise an exception. Equivalent examples: die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n" unless chdir '/usr/spool/news'; chdir '/usr/spool/news' or die "Can't cd to spool: $!\n" If the value of EXPR does not end in a newline, the current script line number and input line num- ber (if any) are also printed, and a newline is supplied. Note that the "input line number" (also known as "chunk") is subject to whatever notion of "line" happens to be currently in effect, and is also available as the special variable $.. See "$/" in perlvar and "$." in perlvar. Hint: sometimes appending ", stopped" to your mes- sage will cause it to make better sense when the string "at foo line 123" is appended. Suppose you are running script "canasta". die "/etc/games is no good"; die "/etc/games is no good, stopped"; produce, respectively /etc/games is no good at canasta line 123. /etc/games is no good, stopped at canasta line 123. See also exit(), warn(), and the Carp module. If LIST is empty and $@ already contains a value (typically from a previous eval) that value is reused after appending "\t...propagated". This is useful for propagating exceptions: eval { ... }; die unless $@ =~ /Expected exception/; If $@ is empty then the string "Died" is used. die() can also be called with a reference argu- ment. If this happens to be trapped within an eval(), $@ contains the reference. This behavior permits a more elaborate exception handling imple- mentation using objects that maintain arbitrary state about the nature of the exception. Such a scheme is sometimes preferable to matching partic- ular string values of $@ using regular expres- sions. Here's an example: eval { ... ; die Some::Module::Exception->new( FOO => "bar" ) }; if ($@) { if (ref($@) && UNIVERSAL::isa($@,"Some::Module::Exception")) { # handle Some::Module::Exception } else { # handle all other possible exceptions } } Because perl will stringify uncaught exception messages before displaying them, you may want to overload stringification operations on such custom exception objects. See overload for details about that. You can arrange for a callback to be run just before the "die" does its deed, by setting the $SIG{__DIE__} hook. The associated handler will be called with the error text and can change the error message, if it sees fit, by calling "die" again. See "$SIG{expr}" in perlvar for details on setting %SIG entries, and "eval BLOCK" for some examples. Although this feature was meant to be run only right before your program was to exit, this is not currently the case--the $SIG{__DIE__} hook is currently called even inside eval()ed blocks/strings! If one wants the hook to do noth- ing in such situations, put die @_ if $^S; as the first line of the handler (see "$^S" in perlvar). Because this promotes strange action at a distance, this counterintuitive behavior may be fixed in a future release. do BLOCK Not really a function. Returns the value of the last command in the sequence of commands indicated by BLOCK. When modified by a loop modifier, exe- cutes the BLOCK once before testing the loop con- dition. (On other statements the loop modifiers test the conditional first.) "do BLOCK" does not count as a loop, so the loop control statements "next", "last", or "redo" can- not be used to leave or restart the block. See perlsyn for alternative strategies. do SUBROUTINE(E) A deprecated form of subroutine call. See perl- sub. do EXPR Uses the value of EXPR as a filename and executes the contents of the file as a Perl script. Its primary use is to include subroutines from a Perl subroutine library. do 'stat.pl'; is just like scalar eval `cat stat.pl`; except that it's more efficient and concise, keeps track of the current filename for error messages, searches the @INC libraries, and updates %INC if the file is found. See "Predefined Names" in per- lvar for these variables. It also differs in that code evaluated with "do FILENAME" cannot see lexi- cals in the enclosing scope; "eval STRING" does. It's the same, however, in that it does reparse the file every time you call it, so you probably don't want to do this inside a loop. If "do" cannot read the file, it returns undef and sets $! to the error. If "do" can read the file but cannot compile it, it returns undef and sets an error message in $@. If the file is success- fully compiled, "do" returns the value of the last expression evaluated. Note that inclusion of library modules is better done with the "use" and "require" operators, which also do automatic error checking and raise an exception if there's a problem. You might like to use "do" to read in a program configuration file. Manual error checking can be done this way: # read in config files: system first, then user for $file ("/share/prog/defaults.rc", "$ENV{HOME}/.someprogrc") { unless ($return = do $file) { warn "couldn't parse $file: $@" if $@; warn "couldn't do $file: $!" unless defined $return; warn "couldn't run $file" unless $return; } } dump LABEL dump This function causes an immediate core dump. See also the -u command-line switch in perlrun, which does the same thing. Primarily this is so that you can use the undump program (not supplied) to turn your core dump into an executable binary after having initialized all your variables at the beginning of the program. When the new binary is executed it will begin by executing a "goto LABEL" (with all the restrictions that "goto" suffers). Think of it as a goto with an intervening core dump and reincarnation. If "LABEL" is omitted, restarts the program from the top. WARNING: Any files opened at the time of the dump will not be open any more when the program is reincarnated, with possible resulting confusion on the part of Perl. This function is now largely obsolete, partly because it's very hard to convert a core file into an executable, and because the real compiler back- ends for generating portable bytecode and compil- able C code have superseded it. If you're looking to use dump to speed up your program, consider generating bytecode or native C code as described in perlcc. If you're just try- ing to accelerate a CGI script, consider using the "mod_perl" extension to Apache, or the CPAN mod- ule, Fast::CGI. You might also consider autoload- ing or selfloading, which at least make your pro- gram appear to run faster. each HASH When called in list context, returns a 2-element list consisting of the key and value for the next element of a hash, so that you can iterate over it. When called in scalar context, returns only the key for the next element in the hash. Entries are returned in an apparently random order. The actual random order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it is guar- anteed to be in the same order as either the "keys" or "values" function would produce on the same (unmodified) hash. When the hash is entirely read, a null array is returned in list context (which when assigned pro- duces a false (0) value), and "undef" in scalar context. The next call to "each" after that will start iterating again. There is a single iterator for each hash, shared by all "each", "keys", and "values" function calls in the program; it can be reset by reading all the elements from the hash, or by evaluating "keys HASH" or "values HASH". If you add or delete elements of a hash while you're iterating over it, you may get entries skipped or duplicated, so don't. Exception: It is always safe to delete the item most recently returned by "each()", which means that the following code will work: while (($key, $value) = each %hash) { print $key, "\n"; delete $hash{$key}; # This is safe } The following prints out your environment like the printenv(v) program, only in a different order: while (($key,$value) = each %ENV) { print "$key=$value\n"; } See also "keys", "values" and "sort". eof FILEHANDLE eof () eof Returns 1 if the next read on FILEHANDLE will return end of file, or if FILEHANDLE is not open. FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the real filehandle. (Note that this function actually reads a character and then "ungetc"s it, so isn't very useful in an interactive context.) Do not read from a terminal file (or call "eof(f)" on it) after end-of-file is reached. File types such as terminals may lose the end-of-file condition if you do. An "eof" without an argument uses the last file read. Using "eof()" with empty parentheses is very different. It refers to the pseudo file formed from the files listed on the command line and accessed via the "<>" operator. Since "<>" isn't explicitly opened, as a normal filehandle is, an "eof()" before "<>" has been used will cause @ARGV to be examined to determine if input is available. In a "while (<>)" loop, "eof" or "eof(f)" can be used to detect the end of each file, "eof()" will only detect the end of the last file. Exam- ples: # reset line numbering on each input file while (<>) { next if /^\s*#/; # skip comments print "$.\t$_"; } continue { close ARGV if eof; # Not eof()! } # insert dashes just before last line of last file while (<>) { if (eof()) { # check for end of current file print "--------------\n"; close(e); # close or last; is needed if we # are reading from the terminal } print; } Practical hint: you almost never need to use "eof" in Perl, because the input operators typically return "undef" when they run out of data, or if there was an error. eval EXPR eval BLOCK In the first form, the return value of EXPR is parsed and executed as if it were a little Perl program. The value of the expression (which is itself determined within scalar context) is first parsed, and if there weren't any errors, executed in the lexical context of the current Perl pro- gram, so that any variable settings or subroutine and format definitions remain afterwards. Note that the value is parsed every time the eval exe- cutes. If EXPR is omitted, evaluates $_. This form is typically used to delay parsing and subse- quent execution of the text of EXPR until run time. In the second form, the code within the BLOCK is parsed only once--at the same time the code sur- rounding the eval itself was parsed--and executed within the context of the current Perl program. This form is typically used to trap exceptions more efficiently than the first (see below), while also providing the benefit of checking the code within BLOCK at compile time. The final semicolon, if any, may be omitted from the value of EXPR or within the BLOCK. In both forms, the value returned is the value of the last expression evaluated inside the mini-pro- gram; a return statement may be also used, just as with subroutines. The expression providing the return value is evaluated in void, scalar, or list context, depending on the context of the eval itself. See "wantarray" for more on how the eval- uation context can be determined. If there is a syntax error or runtime error, or a "die" statement is executed, an undefined value is returned by "eval", and $@ is set to the error message. If there was no error, $@ is guaranteed to be a null string. Beware that using "eval" neither silences perl from printing warnings to STDERR, nor does it stuff the text of warning mes- sages into $@. To do either of those, you have to use the $SIG{__WARN__} facility. See "warn" and perlvar. Note that, because "eval" traps otherwise-fatal errors, it is useful for determining whether a particular feature (such as "socket" or "symlink") is implemented. It is also Perl's exception trap- ping mechanism, where the die operator is used to raise exceptions. If the code to be executed doesn't vary, you may use the eval-BLOCK form to trap run-time errors without incurring the penalty of recompiling each time. The error, if any, is still returned in $@. Examples: # make divide-by-zero nonfatal eval { $answer = $a / $b; }; warn $@ if $@; # same thing, but less efficient eval '$answer = $a / $b'; warn $@ if $@; # a compile-time error eval { $answer = }; # WRONG # a run-time error eval '$answer ='; # sets $@ Due to the current arguably broken state of "__DIE__" hooks, when using the "eval{}" form as an exception trap in libraries, you may wish not to trigger any "__DIE__" hooks that user code may have installed. You can use the "local $SIG{__DIE__}" construct for this purpose, as shown in this example: # a very private exception trap for divide-by-zero eval { local $SIG{'__DIE__'}; $answer = $a / $b; }; warn $@ if $@; This is especially significant, given that "__DIE__" hooks can call "die" again, which has the effect of changing their error messages: # __DIE__ hooks may modify error messages { local $SIG{'__DIE__'} = sub { (my $x = $_[0]) =~ s/foo/bar/g; die $x }; eval { die "foo lives here" }; print $@ if $@; # prints "bar lives here" } Because this promotes action at a distance, this counterintuitive behavior may be fixed in a future release. With an "eval", you should be especially careful to remember what's being looked at when: eval $x; # CASE 1 eval "$x"; # CASE 2 eval '$x'; # CASE 3 eval { $x }; # CASE 4 eval "\$$x++"; # CASE 5 $$x++; # CASE 6 Cases 1 and 2 above behave identically: they run the code contained in the variable $x. (Although case 2 has misleading double quotes making the reader wonder what else might be happening (nothing is).) Cases 3 and 4 likewise behave in the same way: they run the code '$x', which does nothing but return the value of $x. (Case 4 is preferred for purely visual reasons, but it also has the advantage of compiling at compile-time instead of at run-time.) Case 5 is a place where normally you would like to use double quotes, except that in this particular situation, you can just use symbolic references instead, as in case 6. "eval BLOCK" does not count as a loop, so the loop control statements "next", "last", or "redo" can- not be used to leave or restart the block. exec LIST exec PROGRAM LIST The "exec" function executes a system command and never returns-- use "system" instead of "exec" if you want it to return. It fails and returns false only if the command does not exist and it is exe- cuted directly instead of via your system's com- mand shell (see below). Since it's a common mistake to use "exec" instead of "system", Perl warns you if there is a follow- ing statement which isn't "die", "warn", or "exit" (if "-w" is set - but you always do that). If you really want to follow an "exec" with some other statement, you can use one of these styles to avoid the warning: exec ('foo') or print STDERR "couldn't exec foo: $!"; { exec ('foo') }; print STDERR "couldn't exec foo: $!"; If there is more than one argument in LIST, or if LIST is an array with more than one value, calls execvp(p) with the arguments in LIST. If there is only one scalar argument or an array with one ele- ment in it, the argument is checked for shell metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is "/bin/sh -c" on Unix plat- forms, but varies on other platforms). If there are no shell metacharacters in the argument, it is split into words and passed directly to "execvp", which is more efficient. Examples: exec '/bin/echo', 'Your arguments are: ', @ARGV; exec "sort $outfile | uniq"; If you don't really want to execute the first argument, but want to lie to the program you are executing about its own name, you can specify the program you actually want to run as an "indirect object" (without a comma) in front of the LIST. (This always forces interpretation of the LIST as a multivalued list, even if there is only a single scalar in the list.) Example: $shell = '/bin/csh'; exec $shell '-sh'; # pretend it's a login shell or, more directly, exec {'/bin/csh'} '-sh'; # pretend it's a login shell When the arguments get executed via the system shell, results will be subject to its quirks and capabilities. See "`STRING`" in perlop for details. Using an indirect object with "exec" or "system" is also more secure. This usage (which also works fine with system()) forces interpretation of the arguments as a multivalued list, even if the list had just one argument. That way you're safe from the shell expanding wildcards or splitting up words with whitespace in them. @args = ( "echo surprise" ); exec @args; # subject to shell escapes # if @args == 1 exec { $args[0] } @args; # safe even with one-arg list The first version, the one without the indirect object, ran the echo program, passing it "sur- prise" an argument. The second version didn't--it tried to run a program literally called "echo sur- prise", didn't find it, and set $? to a non-zero value indicating failure. Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before the exec, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the "autoflush()" method of "IO::Handle" on any open handles in order to avoid lost output. Note that "exec" will not call your "END" blocks, nor will it call any "DESTROY" methods in your objects. exists EXPR Given an expression that specifies a hash element or array element, returns true if the specified element in the hash or array has ever been ini- tialized, even if the corresponding value is unde- fined. The element is not autovivified if it doesn't exist. print "Exists\n" if exists $hash{$key}; print "Defined\n" if defined $hash{$key}; print "True\n" if $hash{$key}; print "Exists\n" if exists $array[$index]; print "Defined\n" if defined $array[$index]; print "True\n" if $array[$index]; A hash or array element can be true only if it's defined, and defined if it exists, but the reverse doesn't necessarily hold true. Given an expression that specifies the name of a subroutine, returns true if the specified subrou- tine has ever been declared, even if it is unde- fined. Mentioning a subroutine name for exists or defined does not count as declaring it. Note that a subroutine which does not exist may still be callable: its package may have an "AUTOLOAD" method that makes it spring into existence the first time that it is called -- see perlsub. print "Exists\n" if exists &subroutine; print "Defined\n" if defined &subroutine; Note that the EXPR can be arbitrarily complicated as long as the final operation is a hash or array key lookup or subroutine name: if (exists $ref->{A}->{B}->{$key}) { } if (exists $hash{A}{B}{$key}) { } if (exists $ref->{A}->{B}->[$ix]) { } if (exists $hash{A}{B}[$ix]) { } if (exists &{$ref->{A}{B}{$key}}) { } Although the deepest nested array or hash will not spring into existence just because its existence was tested, any intervening ones will. Thus "$ref->{"A"}" and "$ref->{"A"}->{"B"}" will spring into existence due to the existence test for the $key element above. This happens anywhere the arrow operator is used, including even: undef $ref; if (exists $ref->{"Some key"}) { } print $ref; # prints HASH(H) This surprising autovivification in what does not at first--or even second--glance appear to be an lvalue context may be fixed in a future release. See "Pseudo-hashes: Using an array as a hash" in perlref for specifics on how exists() acts when used on a pseudo-hash. Use of a subroutine call, rather than a subroutine name, as an argument to exists() is an error. exists ⊂ # OK exists &sub(); # Error exit EXPR Evaluates EXPR and exits immediately with that value. Example: $ans = <STDIN>; exit 0 if $ans =~ /^[Xx]/; See also "die". If EXPR is omitted, exits with 0 status. The only universally recognized values for EXPR are 0 for success and 1 for error; other values are subject to interpretation depending on the environment in which the Perl program is run- ning. For example, exiting 69 (EX_UNAVAILABLE) from a sendmail incoming-mail filter will cause the mailer to return the item undelivered, but that's not true everywhere. Don't use "exit" to abort a subroutine if there's any chance that someone might want to trap what- ever error happened. Use "die" instead, which can be trapped by an "eval". The exit() function does not always exit immedi- ately. It calls any defined "END" routines first, but these "END" routines may not themselves abort the exit. Likewise any object destructors that need to be called are called before the real exit. If this is a problem, you can call "POSIX:_exit($status)" to avoid END and destructor processing. See perlmod for details. exp EXPR exp Returns e (the natural logarithm base) to the power of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, gives "exp($_)". fcntl FILEHANDLE,FUNCTION,SCALAR Implements the fcntl(l) function. You'll probably have to say use Fcntl; first to get the correct constant definitions. Argument processing and value return works just like "ioctl" below. For example: use Fcntl; fcntl($filehandle, F_GETFL, $packed_return_buffer) or die "can't fcntl F_GETFL: $!"; You don't have to check for "defined" on the return from "fnctl". Like "ioctl", it maps a 0 return from the system call into "0 but true" in Perl. This string is true in boolean context and 0 in numeric context. It is also exempt from the normal -w warnings on improper numeric conver- sions. Note that "fcntl" will produce a fatal error if used on a machine that doesn't implement fcntl(l). See the Fcntl module or your fcntl(l) manpage to learn what functions are available on your system. fileno FILEHANDLE Returns the file descriptor for a filehandle, or undefined if the filehandle is not open. This is mainly useful for constructing bitmaps for "select" and low-level POSIX tty-handling opera- tions. If FILEHANDLE is an expression, the value is taken as an indirect filehandle, generally its name. You can use this to find out whether two handles refer to the same underlying descriptor: if (fileno(o) == fileno(o)) { print "THIS and THAT are dups\n"; } flock FILEHANDLE,OPERATION Calls flock(k), or an emulation of it, on FILEHAN- DLE. Returns true for success, false on failure. Produces a fatal error if used on a machine that doesn't implement flock(k), fcntl(l) locking, or lockf(f). "flock" is Perl's portable file locking interface, although it locks only entire files, not records. Two potentially non-obvious but traditional "flock" semantics are that it waits indefinitely until the lock is granted, and that its locks merely advisory. Such discretionary locks are more flexible, but offer fewer guarantees. This means that files locked with "flock" may be modi- fied by programs that do not also use "flock". See perlport, your port's specific documentation, or your system-specific local manpages for details. It's best to assume traditional behavior if you're writing portable programs. (But if you're not, you should as always feel perfectly free to write for your own system's idiosyncrasies (sometimes called "features"). Slavish adherence to portability concerns shouldn't get in the way of your getting your job done.) OPERATION is one of LOCK_SH, LOCK_EX, or LOCK_UN, possibly combined with LOCK_NB. These constants are traditionally valued 1, 2, 8 and 4, but you can use the symbolic names if you import them from the Fcntl module, either individually, or as a group using the ':flock' tag. LOCK_SH requests a shared lock, LOCK_EX requests an exclusive lock, and LOCK_UN releases a previously requested lock. If LOCK_NB is bitwise-or'ed with LOCK_SH or LOCK_EX then "flock" will return immediately rather than blocking waiting for the lock (check the return status to see if you got it). To avoid the possibility of miscoordination, Perl now flushes FILEHANDLE before locking or unlocking it. Note that the emulation built with lockf(f) doesn't provide shared locks, and it requires that FILEHANDLE be open with write intent. These are the semantics that lockf(f) implements. Most if not all systems implement lockf(f) in terms of fcntl(l) locking, though, so the differing seman- tics shouldn't bite too many people. Note also that some versions of "flock" cannot lock things over the network; you would need to use the more system-specific "fcntl" for that. If you like you can force Perl to ignore your sys- tem's flock(k) function, and so provide its own fcntl(l)-based emulation, by passing the switch "-Ud_flock" to the Configure program when you con- figure perl. Here's a mailbox appender for BSD systems. use Fcntl ':flock'; # import LOCK_* constants sub lock { flock(MBOX,LOCK_EX); # and, in case someone appended # while we were waiting... seek(MBOX, 0, 2); } sub unlock { flock(MBOX,LOCK_UN); } open(MBOX, ">>/usr/spool/mail/$ENV{'USER'}") or die "Can't open mailbox: $!"; lock(); print MBOX $msg,"\n\n"; unlock(); On systems that support a real flock(), locks are inherited across fork() calls, whereas those that must resort to the more capricious fcntl() func- tion lose the locks, making it harder to write servers. See also DB_File for other flock() examples. fork Does a fork(k) system call to create a new process running the same program at the same point. It returns the child pid to the parent process, 0 to the child process, or "undef" if the fork is unsuccessful. File descriptors (and sometimes locks on those descriptors) are shared, while everything else is copied. On most systems sup- porting fork(), great care has gone into making it extremely efficient (for example, using copy-on- write technology on data pages), making it the dominant paradigm for multitasking over the last few decades. Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before forking the child process, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the "autoflush()" method of "IO::Handle" on any open handles in order to avoid duplicate output. If you "fork" without ever waiting on your chil- dren, you will accumulate zombies. On some sys- tems, you can avoid this by setting $SIG{CHLD} to "IGNORE". See also perlipc for more examples of forking and reaping moribund children. Note that if your forked child inherits system file descriptors like STDIN and STDOUT that are actually connected by a pipe or socket, even if you exit, then the remote server (such as, say, a CGI script or a backgrounded job launched from a remote shell) won't think you're done. You should reopen those to /dev/null if it's any issue. format Declare a picture format for use by the "write" function. For example: format Something = Test: @<<<<<<<< @||||| @>>>>> $str, $%, '$' . int($num) . $str = "widget"; $num = $cost/$quantity; $~ = 'Something'; write; See perlform for many details and examples. formline PICTURE,LIST This is an internal function used by "format"s, though you may call it, too. It formats (see perlform) a list of values according to the con- tents of PICTURE, placing the output into the for- mat output accumulator, $^A (or $ACCUMULATOR in English). Eventually, when a "write" is done, the contents of $^A are written to some filehandle, but you could also read $^A yourself and then set $^A back to "". Note that a format typically does one "formline" per line of form, but the "form- line" function itself doesn't care how many new- lines are embedded in the PICTURE. This means that the "~" and "~~" tokens will treat the entire PICTURE as a single line. You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record format, just like the format compiler. Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, because an "@" character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name. "formline" always returns true. See perlform for other exam- ples. getc FILEHANDLE getc Returns the next character from the input file attached to FILEHANDLE, or the undefined value at end of file, or if there was an error. If FILE- HANDLE is omitted, reads from STDIN. This is not particularly efficient. However, it cannot be used by itself to fetch single characters without waiting for the user to hit enter. For that, try something more like: if ($BSD_STYLE) { system "stty cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1"; } else { system "stty", '-icanon', 'eol', "\001"; } $key = getc(c); if ($BSD_STYLE) { system "stty -cbreak </dev/tty >/dev/tty 2>&1"; } else { system "stty", 'icanon', 'eol', '^@'; # ASCII null } print "\n"; Determination of whether $BSD_STYLE should be set is left as an exercise to the reader. The "POSIX::getattr" function can do this more portably on systems purporting POSIX compliance. See also the "Term::ReadKey" module from your nearest CPAN site; details on CPAN can be found on "CPAN" in perlmodlib. getlogin Implements the C library function of the same name, which on most systems returns the current login from /etc/utmp, if any. If null, use "getp- wuid". $login = getlogin || getpwuid($<) || "Kilroy"; Do not consider "getlogin" for authentication: it is not as secure as "getpwuid". getpeername SOCKET Returns the packed sockaddr address of other end of the SOCKET connection. use Socket; $hersockaddr = getpeername(e); ($port, $iaddr) = sockaddr_in($hersockaddr); $herhostname = gethostbyaddr($iaddr, AF_INET); $herstraddr = inet_ntoa($iaddr); getpgrp PID Returns the current process group for the speci- fied PID. Use a PID of 0 to get the current pro- cess group for the current process. Will raise an exception if used on a machine that doesn't imple- ment getpgrp(p). If PID is omitted, returns pro- cess group of current process. Note that the POSIX version of "getpgrp" does not accept a PID argument, so only "PID==0" is truly portable. getppid Returns the process id of the parent process. getpriority WHICH,WHO Returns the current priority for a process, a pro- cess group, or a user. (See getpriority(y).) Will raise a fatal exception if used on a machine that doesn't implement getpriority(y). getpwnam NAME getgrnam NAME gethostbyname NAME getnetbyname NAME getprotobyname NAME getpwuid UID getgrgid GID getservbyname NAME,PROTO gethostbyaddr ADDR,ADDRTYPE getnetbyaddr ADDR,ADDRTYPE getprotobynumber NUMBER getservbyport PORT,PROTO getpwent getgrent gethostent getnetent getprotoent getservent setpwent setgrent sethostent STAYOPEN setnetent STAYOPEN setprotoent STAYOPEN setservent STAYOPEN endpwent endgrent endhostent endnetent endprotoent endservent These routines perform the same functions as their counterparts in the system library. In list con- text, the return values from the various get rou- tines are as follows: ($name,$passwd,$uid,$gid, $quota,$comment,$gcos,$dir,$shell,$expire) = getpw* ($name,$passwd,$gid,$members) = getgr* ($name,$aliases,$addrtype,$length,@addrs) = gethost* ($name,$aliases,$addrtype,$net) = getnet* ($name,$aliases,$proto) = getproto* ($name,$aliases,$port,$proto) = getserv* (If the entry doesn't exist you get a null list.) The exact meaning of the $gcos field varies but it usually contains the real name of the user (as opposed to the login name) and other information pertaining to the user. Beware, however, that in many system users are able to change this informa- tion and therefore it cannot be trusted and there- fore the $gcos is tainted (see perlsec). The $passwd and $shell, user's encrypted password and login shell, are also tainted, because of the same reason. In scalar context, you get the name, unless the function was a lookup by name, in which case you get the other thing, whatever it is. (If the entry doesn't exist you get the undefined value.) For example: $uid = getpwnam($name); $name = getpwuid($num); $name = getpwent(); $gid = getgrnam($name); $name = getgrgid($num; $name = getgrent(); #etc. In getpw*() the fields $quota, $comment, and $expire are special cases in the sense that in many systems they are unsupported. If the $quota is unsupported, it is an empty scalar. If it is supported, it usually encodes the disk quota. If the $comment field is unsupported, it is an empty scalar. If it is supported it usually encodes some administrative comment about the user. In some systems the $quota field may be $change or $age, fields that have to do with password aging. In some systems the $comment field may be $class. The $expire field, if present, encodes the expira- tion period of the account or the password. For the availability and the exact meaning of these fields in your system, please consult your getpw- nam(m) documentation and your pwd.h file. You can also find out from within Perl what your $quota and $comment fields mean and whether you have the $expire field by using the "Config" module and the values "d_pwquota", "d_pwage", "d_pwchange", "d_pwcomment", and "d_pwexpire". Shadow password files are only supported if your vendor has imple- mented them in the intuitive fashion that calling the regular C library routines gets the shadow versions if you're running under privilege or if there exists the shadow(w) functions as found in System V ( this includes Solaris and Linux.) Those systems which implement a proprietary shadow password facility are unlikely to be supported. The $members value returned by getgr*() is a space separated list of the login names of the members of the group. For the gethost*() functions, if the "h_errno" variable is supported in C, it will be returned to you via $? if the function call fails. The @addrs value returned by a successful call is a list of the raw addresses returned by the corresponding system library call. In the Internet domain, each address is four bytes long and you can unpack it by saying something like: ($a,$b,$c,$d) = unpack('C4',$addr[0]); The Socket library makes this slightly easier: use Socket; $iaddr = inet_aton("127.1"); # or whatever address $name = gethostbyaddr($iaddr, AF_INET); # or going the other way $straddr = inet_ntoa($iaddr); If you get tired of remembering which element of the return list contains which return value, by- name interfaces are provided in standard modules: "File::stat", "Net::hostent", "Net::netent", "Net::protoent", "Net::servent", "Time::gmtime", "Time::localtime", and "User::grent". These over- ride the normal built-ins, supplying versions that return objects with the appropriate names for each field. For example: use File::stat; use User::pwent; $is_his = (stat($filename)->uid == pwent($whoever)->uid); Even though it looks like they're the same method calls (uid), they aren't, because a "File::stat" object is different from a "User::pwent" object. getsockname SOCKET Returns the packed sockaddr address of this end of the SOCKET connection, in case you don't know the address because you have several different IPs that the connection might have come in on. use Socket; $mysockaddr = getsockname(e); ($port, $myaddr) = sockaddr_in($mysockaddr); printf "Connect to %s [%s]\n", scalar gethostbyaddr($myaddr, AF_INET), inet_ntoa($myaddr); getsockopt SOCKET,LEVEL,OPTNAME Returns the socket option requested, or undef if there is an error. glob EXPR glob Returns the value of EXPR with filename expansions such as the standard Unix shell /bin/csh would do. This is the internal function implementing the "<*.c>" operator, but you can use it directly. If EXPR is omitted, $_ is used. The "<*.c>" operator is discussed in more detail in "I/O Operators" in perlop. Beginning with v5.6.0, this operator is imple- mented using the standard "File::Glob" extension. See File::Glob for details. gmtime EXPR Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 8-element list with the time localized for the standard Greenwich time zone. Typically used as follows: # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday) = gmtime(e); All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct tm'. $sec, $min, and $hour are the seconds, minutes, and hours of the speci- fied time. $mday is the day of the month, and $mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December. $year is the number of years since 1900. That is, $year is 123 in year 2023. $wday is the day of the week, with 0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicat- ing Wednesday. $yday is the day of the year, in the range 0..364 (or 0..365 in leap years.) Note that the $year element is not simply the last two digits of the year. If you assume it is, then you create non-Y2K-compliant programs--and you wouldn't want to do that, would you? The proper way to get a complete 4-digit year is simply: $year += 1900; And to get the last two digits of the year (e.g., '01' in 2001) do: $year = sprintf("%02d", $year % 100); If EXPR is omitted, "gmtime()" uses the current time ("gmtime(e)"). In scalar context, "gmtime()" returns the ctime(e) value: $now_string = gmtime; # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994" Also see the "timegm" function provided by the "Time::Local" module, and the strftime(e) function available via the POSIX module. This scalar value is not locale dependent (see perllocale), but is instead a Perl builtin. Also see the "Time::Local" module, and the strftime(e) and mktime(e) functions available via the POSIX module. To get somewhat similar but locale dependent date strings, set up your locale envi- ronment variables appropriately (please see perl- locale) and try for example: use POSIX qw(w); $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", gmtime; Note that the %a and %b escapes, which represent the short forms of the day of the week and the month of the year, may not necessarily be three characters wide in all locales. goto LABEL goto EXPR goto &NAME The "goto-LABEL" form finds the statement labeled with LABEL and resumes execution there. It may not be used to go into any construct that requires initialization, such as a subroutine or a "fore- ach" loop. It also can't be used to go into a construct that is optimized away, or to get out of a block or subroutine given to "sort". It can be used to go almost anywhere else within the dynamic scope, including out of subroutines, but it's usu- ally better to use some other construct such as "last" or "die". The author of Perl has never felt the need to use this form of "goto" (in Perl, that is--C is another matter). The "goto-EXPR" form expects a label name, whose scope will be resolved dynamically. This allows for computed "goto"s per FORTRAN, but isn't neces- sarily recommended if you're optimizing for main- tainability: goto ("FOO", "BAR", "GLARCH")[$i]; The "goto-&NAME" form is quite different from the other forms of "goto". In fact, it isn't a goto in the normal sense at all, and doesn't have the stigma associated with other gotos. Instead, it substitutes a call to the named subroutine for the currently running subroutine. This is used by "AUTOLOAD" subroutines that wish to load another subroutine and then pretend that the other subrou- tine had been called in the first place (except that any modifications to @_ in the current sub- routine are propagated to the other subroutine.) After the "goto", not even "caller" will be able to tell that this routine was called first. NAME needn't be the name of a subroutine; it can be a scalar variable containing a code reference, or a block which evaluates to a code reference. grep BLOCK LIST grep EXPR,LIST This is similar in spirit to, but not the same as, grep(p) and its relatives. In particular, it is not limited to using regular expressions. Evaluates the BLOCK or EXPR for each element of LIST (locally setting $_ to each element) and returns the list value consisting of those ele- ments for which the expression evaluated to true. In scalar context, returns the number of times the expression was true. @foo = grep(!/^#/, @bar); # weed out comments or equivalently, @foo = grep {!/^#/} @bar; # weed out comments Note that $_ is an alias to the list value, so it can be used to modify the elements of the LIST. While this is useful and supported, it can cause bizarre results if the elements of LIST are not variables. Similarly, grep returns aliases into the original list, much as a for loop's index variable aliases the list elements. That is, mod- ifying an element of a list returned by grep (for example, in a "foreach", "map" or another "grep") actually modifies the element in the original list. This is usually something to be avoided when writing clear code. See also "map" for a list composed of the results of the BLOCK or EXPR. hex EXPR hex Interprets EXPR as a hex string and returns the corresponding value. (To convert strings that might start with either 0, 0x, or 0b, see "oct".) If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. print hex '0xAf'; # prints '175' print hex 'aF'; # same Hex strings may only represent integers. Strings that would cause integer overflow trigger a warn- ing. import There is no builtin "import" function. It is just an ordinary method (subroutine) defined (or inher- ited) by modules that wish to export names to another module. The "use" function calls the "import" method for the package used. See also "use", perlmod, and Exporter. index STR,SUBSTR,POSITION index STR,SUBSTR The index function searches for one string within another, but without the wildcard-like behavior of a full regular-expression pattern match. It returns the position of the first occurrence of SUBSTR in STR at or after POSITION. If POSITION is omitted, starts searching from the beginning of the string. The return value is based at 0 (or whatever you've set the $[ variable to--but don't do that). If the substring is not found, returns one less than the base, ordinarily "-1". int EXPR int Returns the integer portion of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. You should not use this func- tion for rounding: one because it truncates towards 0, and two because machine representations of floating point numbers can sometimes produce counterintuitive results. For example, "int(-6.725/0.025)" produces -268 rather than the correct -269; that's because it's really more like -268.99999999999994315658 instead. Usually, the "sprintf", "printf", or the "POSIX::floor" and "POSIX::ceil" functions will serve you better than will int(). ioctl FILEHANDLE,FUNCTION,SCALAR Implements the ioctl(l) function. You'll probably first have to say require "ioctl.ph"; # probably in /usr/local/lib/perl/ioctl.ph to get the correct function definitions. If ioctl.ph doesn't exist or doesn't have the correct definitions you'll have to roll your own, based on your C header files such as <sys/ioctl.h>. (There is a Perl script called h2ph that comes with the Perl kit that may help you in this, but it's non- trivial.) SCALAR will be read and/or written depending on the FUNCTION--a pointer to the string value of SCALAR will be passed as the third argu- ment of the actual "ioctl" call. (If SCALAR has no string value but does have a numeric value, that value will be passed rather than a pointer to the string value. To guarantee this to be true, add a 0 to the scalar before using it.) The "pack" and "unpack" functions may be needed to manipulate the values of structures used by "ioctl". The return value of "ioctl" (and "fcntl") is as follows: if OS returns: then Perl returns: -1 undefined value 0 string "0 but true" anything else that number Thus Perl returns true on success and false on failure, yet you can still easily determine the actual value returned by the operating system: $retval = ioctl(...) || -1; printf "System returned %d\n", $retval; The special string "0 but true" is exempt from -w complaints about improper numeric conversions. Here's an example of setting a filehandle named "REMOTE" to be non-blocking at the system level. You'll have to negotiate $| on your own, though. use Fcntl qw(F_GETFL F_SETFL O_NONBLOCK); $flags = fcntl(REMOTE, F_GETFL, 0) or die "Can't get flags for the socket: $!\n"; $flags = fcntl(REMOTE, F_SETFL, $flags | O_NONBLOCK) or die "Can't set flags for the socket: $!\n"; join EXPR,LIST Joins the separate strings of LIST into a single string with fields separated by the value of EXPR, and returns that new string. Example: $rec = join(':', $login,$passwd,$uid,$gid,$gcos,$home,$shell); Beware that unlike "split", "join" doesn't take a pattern as its first argument. Compare "split". keys HASH Returns a list consisting of all the keys of the named hash. (In scalar context, returns the num- ber of keys.) The keys are returned in an appar- ently random order. The actual random order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it is guaranteed to be the same order as either the "values" or "each" function produces (given that the hash has not been modified). As a side effect, it resets HASH's iterator. Here is yet another way to print your environment: @keys = keys %ENV; @values = values %ENV; while (@keys) { print pop(@keys), '=', pop(@values), "\n"; } or how about sorted by key: foreach $key (sort(keys %ENV)) { print $key, '=', $ENV{$key}, "\n"; } The returned values are copies of the original keys in the hash, so modifying them will not affect the original hash. Compare "values". To sort a hash by value, you'll need to use a "sort" function. Here's a descending numeric sort of a hash by its values: foreach $key (sort { $hash{$b} <=> $hash{$a} } keys %hash) { printf "%4d %s\n", $hash{$key}, $key; } As an lvalue "keys" allows you to increase the number of hash buckets allocated for the given hash. This can gain you a measure of efficiency if you know the hash is going to get big. (This is similar to pre-extending an array by assigning a larger number to $#array.) If you say keys %hash = 200; then %hash will have at least 200 buckets allo- cated for it--256 of them, in fact, since it rounds up to the next power of two. These buckets will be retained even if you do "%hash = ()", use "undef %hash" if you want to free the storage while %hash is still in scope. You can't shrink the number of buckets allocated for the hash using "keys" in this way (but you needn't worry about doing this by accident, as trying has no effect). See also "each", "values" and "sort". kill SIGNAL, LIST Sends a signal to a list of processes. Returns the number of processes successfully signaled (which is not necessarily the same as the number actually killed). $cnt = kill 1, $child1, $child2; kill 9, @goners; If SIGNAL is zero, no signal is sent to the pro- cess. This is a useful way to check that the pro- cess is alive and hasn't changed its UID. See perlport for notes on the portability of this con- struct. Unlike in the shell, if SIGNAL is negative, it kills process groups instead of processes. (On System V, a negative PROCESS number will also kill process groups, but that's not portable.) That means you usually want to use positive not nega- tive signals. You may also use a signal name in quotes. See "Signals" in perlipc for details. last LABEL last The "last" command is like the "break" statement in C (as used in loops); it immediately exits the loop in question. If the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. The "continue" block, if any, is not executed: LINE: while (<STDIN>) { last LINE if /^$/; # exit when done with header #... } "last" cannot be used to exit a block which returns a value such as "eval {}", "sub {}" or "do {}", and should not be used to exit a grep() or map() operation. Note that a block by itself is semantically iden- tical to a loop that executes once. Thus "last" can be used to effect an early exit out of such a block. See also "continue" for an illustration of how "last", "next", and "redo" work. lc EXPR lc Returns an lowercased version of EXPR. This is the internal function implementing the "\L" escape in double-quoted strings. Respects current LC_CTYPE locale if "use locale" in force. See perllocale and utf8. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. lcfirst EXPR lcfirst Returns the value of EXPR with the first character lowercased. This is the internal function imple- menting the "\l" escape in double-quoted strings. Respects current LC_CTYPE locale if "use locale" in force. See perllocale. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. length EXPR length Returns the length in characters of the value of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, returns length of $_. Note that this cannot be used on an entire array or hash to find out how many elements these have. For that, use "scalar @array" and "scalar keys %hash" respectively. link OLDFILE,NEWFILE Creates a new filename linked to the old filename. Returns true for success, false otherwise. listen SOCKET,QUEUESIZE Does the same thing that the listen system call does. Returns true if it succeeded, false other- wise. See the example in "Sockets: Client/Server Communication" in perlipc. local EXPR You really probably want to be using "my" instead, because "local" isn't what most people think of as "local". See "Private Variables via my()" in perlsub for details. A local modifies the listed variables to be local to the enclosing block, file, or eval. If more than one value is listed, the list must be placed in parentheses. See "Temporary Values via local()" in perlsub for details, including issues with tied arrays and hashes. localtime EXPR Converts a time as returned by the time function to a 9-element list with the time analyzed for the local time zone. Typically used as follows: # 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(e); All list elements are numeric, and come straight out of the C `struct tm'. $sec, $min, and $hour are the seconds, minutes, and hours of the speci- fied time. $mday is the day of the month, and $mon is the month itself, in the range 0..11 with 0 indicating January and 11 indicating December. $year is the number of years since 1900. That is, $year is 123 in year 2023. $wday is the day of the week, with 0 indicating Sunday and 3 indicat- ing Wednesday. $yday is the day of the year, in the range 0..364 (or 0..365 in leap years.) $isdst is true if the specified time occurs during daylight savings time, false otherwise. Note that the $year element is not simply the last two digits of the year. If you assume it is, then you create non-Y2K-compliant programs--and you wouldn't want to do that, would you? The proper way to get a complete 4-digit year is simply: $year += 1900; And to get the last two digits of the year (e.g., '01' in 2001) do: $year = sprintf("%02d", $year % 100); If EXPR is omitted, "localtime()" uses the current time ("localtime(e)"). In scalar context, "localtime()" returns the ctime(e) value: $now_string = localtime; # e.g., "Thu Oct 13 04:54:34 1994" This scalar value is not locale dependent, see perllocale, but instead a Perl builtin. Also see the "Time::Local" module (to convert the second, minutes, hours, ... back to seconds since the stroke of midnight the 1st of January 1970, the value returned by time()), and the strftime(e) and mktime(e) functions available via the POSIX mod- ule. To get somewhat similar but locale dependent date strings, set up your locale environment vari- ables appropriately (please see perllocale) and try for example: use POSIX qw(w); $now_string = strftime "%a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y", localtime; Note that the %a and %b, the short forms of the day of the week and the month of the year, may not necessarily be three characters wide. lock lock I<THING> This function places an advisory lock on a vari- able, subroutine, or referenced object contained in THING until the lock goes out of scope. This is a built-in function only if your version of Perl was built with threading enabled, and if you've said "use Threads". Otherwise a user- defined function by this name will be called. See Thread. log EXPR log Returns the natural logarithm (base e) of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, returns log of $_. To get the log of another base, use basic algebra: The base-N log of a number is equal to the natural log of that number divided by the natural log of N. For example: sub log10 { my $n = shift; return log($n)/log(g); } See also "exp" for the inverse operation. lstat FILEHANDLE lstat EXPR lstat Does the same thing as the "stat" function (including setting the special "_" filehandle) but stats a symbolic link instead of the file the sym- bolic link points to. If symbolic links are unim- plemented on your system, a normal "stat" is done. If EXPR is omitted, stats $_. m// The match operator. See perlop. map BLOCK LIST map EXPR,LIST Evaluates the BLOCK or EXPR for each element of LIST (locally setting $_ to each element) and returns the list value composed of the results of each such evaluation. In scalar context, returns the total number of elements so generated. Evalu- ates BLOCK or EXPR in list context, so each ele- ment of LIST may produce zero, one, or more ele- ments in the returned value. @chars = map(chr, @nums); translates a list of numbers to the corresponding characters. And %hash = map { getkey($_) => $_ } @array; is just a funny way to write %hash = (); foreach $_ (@array) { $hash{getkey($_)} = $_; } Note that $_ is an alias to the list value, so it can be used to modify the elements of the LIST. While this is useful and supported, it can cause bizarre results if the elements of LIST are not variables. Using a regular "foreach" loop for this purpose would be clearer in most cases. See also "grep" for an array composed of those items of the original list for which the BLOCK or EXPR evaluates to true. "{" starts both hash references and blocks, so "map { ..." could be either the start of map BLOCK LIST or map EXPR, LIST. Because perl doesn't look ahead for the closing "}" it has to take a guess at which its dealing with based what it finds just after the "{". Usually it gets it right, but if it doesn't it won't realize something is wrong until it gets to the "}" and encounters the missing (or unexpected) comma. The syntax error will be reported close to the "}" but you'll need to change something near the "{" such as using a unary "+" to give perl some help: %hash = map { "\L$_", 1 } @array # perl guesses EXPR. wrong %hash = map { +"\L$_", 1 } @array # perl guesses BLOCK. right %hash = map { ("\L$_", 1) } @array # this also works %hash = map { lc($_), 1 } @array # as does this. %hash = map +( lc($_), 1 ), @array # this is EXPR and works! %hash = map ( lc($_), 1 ), @array # evaluates to (1, @array) or to force an anon hash constructor use "+{" @hashes = map +{ lc($_), 1 }, @array # EXPR, so needs , at end and you get list of anonymous hashes each with only 1 entry. mkdir FILENAME,MASK mkdir FILENAME Creates the directory specified by FILENAME, with permissions specified by MASK (as modified by "umask"). If it succeeds it returns true, other- wise it returns false and sets $! (errno). If omitted, MASK defaults to 0777. In general, it is better to create directories with permissive MASK, and let the user modify that with their "umask", than it is to supply a restrictive MASK and give the user no way to be more permissive. The exceptions to this rule are when the file or directory should be kept private (mail files, for instance). The perlfunc(c) entry on "umask" discusses the choice of MASK in more detail. msgctl ID,CMD,ARG Calls the System V IPC function msgctl(l). You'll probably have to say use IPC::SysV; first to get the correct constant definitions. If CMD is "IPC_STAT", then ARG must be a variable which will hold the returned "msqid_ds" structure. Returns like "ioctl": the undefined value for error, "0 but true" for zero, or the actual return value otherwise. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc, "IPC::SysV", and "IPC::Semaphore" documentation. msgget KEY,FLAGS Calls the System V IPC function msgget(t). Returns the message queue id, or the undefined value if there is an error. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc and "IPC::SysV" and "IPC::Msg" documen- tation. msgrcv ID,VAR,SIZE,TYPE,FLAGS Calls the System V IPC function msgrcv to receive a message from message queue ID into variable VAR with a maximum message size of SIZE. Note that when a message is received, the message type as a native long integer will be the first thing in VAR, followed by the actual message. This packing may be opened with "unpack("l! a*")". Taints the variable. Returns true if successful, or false if there is an error. See also "SysV IPC" in per- lipc, "IPC::SysV", and "IPC::SysV::Msg" documenta- tion. msgsnd ID,MSG,FLAGS Calls the System V IPC function msgsnd to send the message MSG to the message queue ID. MSG must begin with the native long integer message type, and be followed by the length of the actual mes- sage, and finally the message itself. This kind of packing can be achieved with "pack("l! a*", $type, $message)". Returns true if successful, or false if there is an error. See also "IPC::SysV" and "IPC::SysV::Msg" documentation. my EXPR my EXPR : ATTRIBUTES A "my" declares the listed variables to be local (lexically) to the enclosing block, file, or "eval". If more than one value is listed, the list must be placed in parentheses. See "Private Variables via my()" in perlsub for details. next LABEL next The "next" command is like the "continue" state- ment in C; it starts the next iteration of the loop: LINE: while (<STDIN>) { next LINE if /^#/; # discard comments #... } Note that if there were a "continue" block on the above, it would get executed even on discarded lines. If the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. "next" cannot be used to exit a block which returns a value such as "eval {}", "sub {}" or "do {}", and should not be used to exit a grep() or map() operation. Note that a block by itself is semantically iden- tical to a loop that executes once. Thus "next" will exit such a block early. See also "continue" for an illustration of how "last", "next", and "redo" work. no Module LIST See the "use" function, which "no" is the opposite of. oct EXPR oct Interprets EXPR as an octal string and returns the corresponding value. (If EXPR happens to start off with "0x", interprets it as a hex string. If EXPR starts off with "0b", it is interpreted as a binary string.) The following will handle deci- mal, binary, octal, and hex in the standard Perl or C notation: $val = oct($val) if $val =~ /^0/; If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. To go the other way (produce a number in octal), use sprintf() or printf(): $perms = (stat("filename"))[2] & 07777; $oct_perms = sprintf "%lo", $perms; The oct() function is commonly used when a string such as 644 needs to be converted into a file mode, for example. (Although perl will automati- cally convert strings into numbers as needed, this automatic conversion assumes base 10.) open FILEHANDLE,MODE,LIST open FILEHANDLE,EXPR open FILEHANDLE Opens the file whose filename is given by EXPR, and associates it with FILEHANDLE. If FILEHANDLE is an expression, its value is used as the name of the real filehandle wanted. (This is considered a symbolic reference, so "use strict 'refs'" should not be in effect.) If EXPR is omitted, the scalar variable of the same name as the FILEHANDLE contains the filename. (Note that lexical variables--those declared with "my"--will not work for this purpose; so if you're using "my", specify EXPR in your call to open.) See perlopentut for a kinder, gentler explanation of opening files. If MODE is '<' or nothing, the file is opened for input. If MODE is '>', the file is truncated and opened for output, being created if necessary. If MODE is '>>', the file is opened for appending, again being created if necessary. You can put a '+' in front of the '>' or '<' to indicate that you want both read and write access to the file; thus '+<' is almost always preferred for read/write updates--the '+>' mode would clobber the file first. You can't usually use either read-write mode for updating textfiles, since they have variable length records. See the -i switch in perlrun for a better approach. The file is created with permissions of 0666 modified by the process' "umask" value. These various prefixes correspond to the fopen(n) modes of 'r', 'r+', 'w', 'w+', 'a', and 'a+'. In the 2-arguments (and 1-argument) form of the call the mode and filename should be concatenated (in this order), possibly separated by spaces. It is possible to omit the mode if the mode is '<'. If the filename begins with '|', the filename is interpreted as a command to which output is to be piped, and if the filename ends with a '|', the filename is interpreted as a command which pipes output to us. See "Using open() for IPC" in per- lipc for more examples of this. (You are not allowed to "open" to a command that pipes both in and out, but see IPC::Open2, IPC::Open3, and "Bidirectional Communication with Another Process" in perlipc for alternatives.) If MODE is '|-', the filename is interpreted as a command to which output is to be piped, and if MODE is '-|', the filename is interpreted as a command which pipes output to us. In the 2-argu- ments (and 1-argument) form one should replace dash ('-') with the command. See "Using open() for IPC" in perlipc for more examples of this. (You are not allowed to "open" to a command that pipes both in and out, but see IPC::Open2, IPC::Open3, and "Bidirectional Communication" in perlipc for alternatives.) In the 2-arguments (and 1-argument) form opening '-' opens STDIN and opening '>-' opens STDOUT. Open returns nonzero upon success, the undefined value otherwise. If the "open" involved a pipe, the return value happens to be the pid of the sub- process. If you're unfortunate enough to be running Perl on a system that distinguishes between text files and binary files (modern operating systems don't care), then you should check out "binmode" for tips for dealing with this. The key distinction between systems that need "binmode" and those that don't is their text file formats. Systems like Unix, MacOS, and Plan9, which delimit lines with a single character, and which encode that character in C as "\n", do not need "binmode". The rest need it. When opening a file, it's usually a bad idea to continue normal execution if the request failed, so "open" is frequently used in connection with "die". Even if "die" won't do what you want (say, in a CGI script, where you want to make a nicely formatted error message (but there are modules that can help with that problem)) you should always check the return value from opening a file. The infrequent exception is when working with an unopened filehandle is actually what you want to do. Examples: $ARTICLE = 100; open ARTICLE or die "Can't find article $ARTICLE: $!\n"; while (<ARTICLE>) {... open(LOG, '>>/usr/spool/news/twitlog'); # (log is reserved) # if the open fails, output is discarded open(DBASE, '+<', 'dbase.mine') # open for update or die "Can't open 'dbase.mine' for update: $!"; open(DBASE, '+<dbase.mine') # ditto or die "Can't open 'dbase.mine' for update: $!"; open(ARTICLE, '-|', "caesar <$article") # decrypt article or die "Can't start caesar: $!"; open(ARTICLE, "caesar <$article |") # ditto or die "Can't start caesar: $!"; open(EXTRACT, "|sort >/tmp/Tmp$$") # $$ is our process id or die "Can't start sort: $!"; # process argument list of files along with any includes foreach $file (@ARGV) { process($file, 'fh00'); } sub process { my($filename, $input) = @_; $input++; # this is a string increment unless (open($input, $filename)) { print STDERR "Can't open $filename: $!\n"; return; } local $_; while (<$input>) { # note use of indirection if (/^#include "(.*)"/) { process($1, $input); next; } #... # whatever } } You may also, in the Bourne shell tradition, spec- ify an EXPR beginning with '>&', in which case the rest of the string is interpreted as the name of a filehandle (or file descriptor, if numeric) to be duped and opened. You may use "&" after ">", ">>", "<", "+>", "+>>", and "+<". The mode you specify should match the mode of the original filehandle. (Duping a filehandle does not take into account any existing contents of stdio buffers.) Duping file handles is not yet sup- ported for 3-argument open(). Here is a script that saves, redirects, and restores STDOUT and STDERR: #!/usr/bin/perl open(OLDOUT, ">&STDOUT"); open(OLDERR, ">&STDERR"); open(STDOUT, '>', "foo.out") || die "Can't redirect stdout"; open(STDERR, ">&STDOUT") || die "Can't dup stdout"; select(t); $| = 1; # make unbuffered select(t); $| = 1; # make unbuffered print STDOUT "stdout 1\n"; # this works for print STDERR "stderr 1\n"; # subprocesses too close(e); close(e); open(STDOUT, ">&OLDOUT"); open(STDERR, ">&OLDERR"); print STDOUT "stdout 2\n"; print STDERR "stderr 2\n"; If you specify '<&=N', where "N" is a number, then Perl will do an equivalent of C's "fdopen" of that file descriptor; this is more parsimonious of file descriptors. For example: open(FILEHANDLE, "<&=$fd") Note that this feature depends on the fdopen() C library function. On many UNIX systems, fdopen() is known to fail when file descriptors exceed a certain value, typically 255. If you need more file descriptors than that, consider rebuilding Perl to use the "sfio" library. If you open a pipe on the command '-', i.e., either '|-' or '-|' with 2-arguments (or 1-argu- ment) form of open(), then there is an implicit fork done, and the return value of open is the pid of the child within the parent process, and 0 within the child process. (Use "defined($pid)" to determine whether the open was successful.) The filehandle behaves normally for the parent, but i/o to that filehandle is piped from/to the STD- OUT/STDIN of the child process. In the child pro- cess the filehandle isn't opened--i/o happens from/to the new STDOUT or STDIN. Typically this is used like the normal piped open when you want to exercise more control over just how the pipe command gets executed, such as when you are run- ning setuid, and don't want to have to scan shell commands for metacharacters. The following triples are more or less equivalent: open(FOO, "|tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'"); open(FOO, '|-', "tr '[a-z]' '[A-Z]'"); open(FOO, '|-') || exec 'tr', '[a-z]', '[A-Z]'; open(FOO, "cat -n '$file'|"); open(FOO, '-|', "cat -n '$file'"); open(FOO, '-|') || exec 'cat', '-n', $file; See "Safe Pipe Opens" in perlipc for more examples of this. Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before any operation that may do a fork, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the "autoflush()" method of "IO::Handle" on any open handles. On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set for the newly opened file descriptor as determined by the value of $^F. See "$^F" in perlvar. Closing any piped filehandle causes the parent process to wait for the child to finish, and returns the status value in $?. The filename passed to 2-argument (or 1-argument) form of open() will have leading and trailing whitespace deleted, and the normal redirection characters honored. This property, known as "magic open", can often be used to good effect. A user could specify a filename of "rsh cat file |", or you could change certain filenames as needed: $filename =~ s/(.*\.gz)\s*$/gzip -dc < $1|/; open(FH, $filename) or die "Can't open $filename: $!"; Use 3-argument form to open a file with arbitrary weird characters in it, open(FOO, '<', $file); otherwise it's necessary to protect any leading and trailing whitespace: $file =~ s#^(\s)#./$1#; open(FOO, "< $file\0"); (this may not work on some bizarre filesystems). One should conscientiously choose between the magic and 3-arguments form of open(): open IN, $ARGV[0]; will allow the user to specify an argument of the form "rsh cat file |", but will not work on a filename which happens to have a trailing space, while open IN, '<', $ARGV[0]; will have exactly the opposite restrictions. If you want a "real" C "open" (see open(n) on your system), then you should use the "sysopen" func- tion, which involves no such magic (but may use subtly different filemodes than Perl open(), which is mapped to C fopen()). This is another way to protect your filenames from interpretation. For example: use IO::Handle; sysopen(HANDLE, $path, O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL) or die "sysopen $path: $!"; $oldfh = select(t); $| = 1; select($oldfh); print HANDLE "stuff $$\n"; seek(HANDLE, 0, 0); print "File contains: ", <HANDLE>; Using the constructor from the "IO::Handle" pack- age (or one of its subclasses, such as "IO::File" or "IO::Socket"), you can generate anonymous file- handles that have the scope of whatever variables hold references to them, and automatically close whenever and however you leave that scope: use IO::File; #... sub read_myfile_munged { my $ALL = shift; my $handle = new IO::File; open($handle, "myfile") or die "myfile: $!"; $first = <$handle> or return (); # Automatically closed here. mung $first or die "mung failed"; # Or here. return $first, <$handle> if $ALL; # Or here. $first; # Or here. } See "seek" for some details about mixing reading and writing. opendir DIRHANDLE,EXPR Opens a directory named EXPR for processing by "readdir", "telldir", "seekdir", "rewinddir", and "closedir". Returns true if successful. DIRHAN- DLEs have their own namespace separate from FILE- HANDLEs. ord EXPR ord Returns the numeric (ASCII or Unicode) value of the first character of EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. For the reverse, see "chr". See utf8 for more about Unicode. our EXPR An "our" declares the listed variables to be valid globals within the enclosing block, file, or "eval". That is, it has the same scoping rules as a "my" declaration, but does not create a local variable. If more than one value is listed, the list must be placed in parentheses. The "our" declaration has no semantic effect unless "use strict vars" is in effect, in which case it lets you use the declared global variable without qual- ifying it with a package name. (But only within the lexical scope of the "our" declaration. In this it differs from "use vars", which is package scoped.) An "our" declaration declares a global variable that will be visible across its entire lexical scope, even across package boundaries. The pack- age in which the variable is entered is determined at the point of the declaration, not at the point of use. This means the following behavior holds: package Foo; our $bar; # declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope $bar = 20; package Bar; print $bar; # prints 20 Multiple "our" declarations in the same lexical scope are allowed if they are in different pack- ages. If they happened to be in the same package, Perl will emit warnings if you have asked for them. use warnings; package Foo; our $bar; # declares $Foo::bar for rest of lexical scope $bar = 20; package Bar; our $bar = 30; # declares $Bar::bar for rest of lexical scope print $bar; # prints 30 our $bar; # emits warning pack TEMPLATE,LIST Takes a LIST of values and converts it into a string using the rules given by the TEMPLATE. The resulting string is the concatenation of the con- verted values. Typically, each converted value looks like its machine-level representation. For example, on 32-bit machines a converted integer may be represented by a sequence of 4 bytes. The TEMPLATE is a sequence of characters that give the order and type of values, as follows: a A string with arbitrary binary data, will be null padded. A An ASCII string, will be space padded. Z A null terminated (asciz) string, will be null padded. b A bit string (ascending bit order inside each byte, like vec()). B A bit string (descending bit order inside each byte). h A hex string (low nybble first). H A hex string (high nybble first). c A signed char value. C An unsigned char value. Only does bytes. See U for Unicode. s A signed short value. S An unsigned short value. (This 'short' is _exactly_ 16 bits, which may differ from what a local C compiler calls 'short'. If you want native-length shorts, use the '!' suffix.) i A signed integer value. I An unsigned integer value. (This 'integer' is _at_least_ 32 bits wide. Its exact size depends on what a local C compiler calls 'int', and may even be larger than the 'long' described in the next item.) l A signed long value. L An unsigned long value. (This 'long' is _exactly_ 32 bits, which may differ from what a local C compiler calls 'long'. If you want native-length longs, use the '!' suffix.) n An unsigned short in "network" (big-endian) order. N An unsigned long in "network" (big-endian) order. v An unsigned short in "VAX" (little-endian) order. V An unsigned long in "VAX" (little-endian) order. (These 'shorts' and 'longs' are _exactly_ 16 bits and _exactly_ 32 bits, respectively.) q A signed quad (64-bit) value. Q An unsigned quad value. (Quads are available only if your system supports 64-bit integer values _and_ if Perl has been compiled to support those. Causes a fatal error otherwise.) f A single-precision float in the native format. d A double-precision float in the native format. p A pointer to a null-terminated string. P A pointer to a structure (fixed-length string). u A uuencoded string. U A Unicode character number. Encodes to UTF-8 internally. Works even if C<use utf8> is not in effect. w A BER compressed integer. Its bytes represent an unsigned integer in base 128, most significant digit first, with as few digits as possible. Bit eight (the high bit) is set on each byte except the last. x A null byte. X Back up a byte. @ Null fill to absolute position. The following rules apply: o Each letter may optionally be followed by a number giving a repeat count. With all types except "a", "A", "Z", "b", "B", "h", "H", and "P" the pack function will gobble up that many values from the LIST. A "*" for the repeat count means to use however many items are left, except for "@", "x", "X", where it is equivalent to 0, and "u", where it is equivalent to 1 (or 45, what is the same). When used with "Z", "*" results in the addition of a trailing null byte (so the packed result will be one longer than the byte "length" of the item). The repeat count for "u" is interpreted as the maximal number of bytes to encode per line of output, with 0 and 1 replaced by 45. o The "a", "A", and "Z" types gobble just one value, but pack it as a string of length count, padding with nulls or spaces as necessary. When unpacking, "A" strips trailing spaces and nulls, "Z" strips everything after the first null, and "a" returns data verbatim. When packing, "a", and "Z" are equivalent. If the value-to-pack is too long, it is truncated. If too long and an explicit count is provided, "Z" packs only "$count-1" bytes, followed by a null byte. Thus "Z" always packs a trailing null byte under all circumstances. o Likewise, the "b" and "B" fields pack a string that many bits long. Each byte of the input field of pack() generates 1 bit of the result. Each result bit is based on the least-significant bit of the corre- sponding input byte, i.e., on "ord($byte)%2". In particular, bytes "0" and "1" generate bits 0 and 1, as do bytes "\0" and "\1". Starting from the beginning of the input string of pack(), each 8-tuple of bytes is converted to 1 byte of output. With for- mat "b" the first byte of the 8-tuple determines the least-significant bit of a byte, and with format "B" it determines the most-significant bit of a byte. If the length of the input string is not exactly divisible by 8, the remainder is packed as if the input string were padded by null bytes at the end. Similarly, dur- ing unpack()ing the "extra" bits are ignored. If the input string of pack() is longer than needed, extra bytes are ignored. A "*" for the repeat count of pack() means to use all the bytes of the input field. On unpack()ing the bits are converted to a string of "0"s and "1"s. o The "h" and "H" fields pack a string that many nybbles (4-bit groups, representable as hexadecimal digits, 0-9a-f) long. Each byte of the input field of pack() generates 4 bits of the result. For non- alphabetical bytes the result is based on the 4 least-significant bits of the input byte, i.e., on "ord($byte)%16". In par- ticular, bytes "0" and "1" generate nyb- bles 0 and 1, as do bytes "\0" and "\1". For bytes "a".."f" and "A".."F" the result is compatible with the usual hexadecimal digits, so that "a" and "A" both generate the nybble "0xa==10". The result for bytes "g".."z" and "G".."Z" is not well-defined. Starting from the beginning of the input string of pack(), each pair of bytes is converted to 1 byte of output. With for- mat "h" the first byte of the pair deter- mines the least-significant nybble of the output byte, and with format "H" it deter- mines the most-significant nybble. If the length of the input string is not even, it behaves as if padded by a null byte at the end. Similarly, during unpack()ing the "extra" nybbles are ignored. If the input string of pack() is longer than needed, extra bytes are ignored. A "*" for the repeat count of pack() means to use all the bytes of the input field. On unpack()ing the bits are converted to a string of hexadecimal digits. o The "p" type packs a pointer to a null- terminated string. You are responsible for ensuring the string is not a temporary value (which can potentially get deallo- cated before you get around to using the packed result). The "P" type packs a pointer to a structure of the size indi- cated by the length. A NULL pointer is created if the corresponding value for "p" or "P" is "undef", similarly for unpack(). o The "/" template character allows packing and unpacking of strings where the packed structure contains a byte count followed by the string itself. You write length- item"/"string-item. The length-item can be any "pack" template letter, and describes how the length value is packed. The ones likely to be of most use are integer-packing ones like "n" (for Java strings), "w" (for ASN.1 or SNMP) and "N" (for Sun XDR). The string-item must, at present, be "A*", "a*" or "Z*". For "unpack" the length of the string is obtained from the length- item, but if you put in the '*' it will be ignored. unpack 'C/a', "\04Gurusamy"; gives 'Guru' unpack 'a3/A* A*', '007 Bond J '; gives (' Bond','J') pack 'n/a* w/a*','hello,','world'; gives "\000\006hello,\005world" The length-item is not returned explicitly from "unpack". Adding a count to the length-item letter is unlikely to do anything useful, unless that letter is "A", "a" or "Z". Packing with a length-item of "a" or "Z" may introduce "\000" characters, which Perl does not regard as legal in numeric strings. o The integer types "s", "S", "l", and "L" may be immediately followed by a "!" suf- fix to signify native shorts or longs--as you can see from above for example a bare "l" does mean exactly 32 bits, the native "long" (as seen by the local C compiler) may be larger. This is an issue mainly in 64-bit platforms. You can see whether using "!" makes any difference by print length(pack("s")), " ", length(pack("s!")), "\n"; print length(pack("l")), " ", length(pack("l!")), "\n"; "i!" and "I!" also work but only because of completeness; they are identical to "i" and "I". The actual sizes (in bytes) of native shorts, ints, longs, and long longs on the platform where Perl was built are also available via Config: use Config; print $Config{shortsize}, "\n"; print $Config{intsize}, "\n"; print $Config{longsize}, "\n"; print $Config{longlongsize}, "\n"; (The $Config{longlongsize} will be unde- fine if your system does not support long longs.) o The integer formats "s", "S", "i", "I", "l", and "L" are inherently non-portable between processors and operating systems because they obey the native byteorder and endianness. For example a 4-byte integer 0x12345678 (305419896 decimal) be ordered natively (arranged in and handled by the CPU registers) into bytes as 0x12 0x34 0x56 0x78 # big-endian 0x78 0x56 0x34 0x12 # little-endian Basically, the Intel and VAX CPUs are lit- tle-endian, while everybody else, for example Motorola m68k/88k, PPC, Sparc, HP PA, Power, and Cray are big-endian. Alpha and MIPS can be either: Digital/Compaq used/uses them in little-endian mode; SGI/Cray uses them in big-endian mode. The names `big-endian' and `little-endian' are comic references to the classic "Gulliver's Travels" (via the paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, April 1, 1980) and the egg-eating habits of the Lilliputians. Some systems may have even weirder byte orders such as 0x56 0x78 0x12 0x34 0x34 0x12 0x78 0x56 You can see your system's preference with print join(" ", map { sprintf "%#02x", $_ } unpack("C*",pack("L",0x12345678))), "\n"; The byteorder on the platform where Perl was built is also available via Config: use Config; print $Config{byteorder}, "\n"; Byteorders '1234' and '12345678' are lit- tle-endian, '4321' and '87654321' are big-endian. If you want portable packed integers use the formats "n", "N", "v", and "V", their byte endianness and size is known. See also perlport. o Real numbers (floats and doubles) are in the native machine format only; due to the multiplicity of floating formats around, and the lack of a standard "network" rep- resentation, no facility for interchange has been made. This means that packed floating point data written on one machine may not be readable on another - even if both use IEEE floating point arithmetic (as the endian-ness of the memory repre- sentation is not part of the IEEE spec). See also perlport. Note that Perl uses doubles internally for all numeric calculation, and converting from double into float and thence back to double again will lose precision (i.e., "unpack("f", pack("f", $foo)") will not in general equal $foo). o If the pattern begins with a "U", the resulting string will be treated as Uni- code-encoded. You can force UTF8 encoding on in a string with an initial "U0", and the bytes that follow will be interpreted as Unicode characters. If you don't want this to happen, you can begin your pattern with "C0" (or anything else) to force Perl not to UTF8 encode your string, and then follow this with a "U*" somewhere in your pattern. o You must yourself do any alignment or padding by inserting for example enough 'x'es while packing. There is no way to pack() and unpack() could know where the bytes are going to or coming from. There- fore "pack" (and "unpack") handle their output and input as flat sequences of bytes. o A comment in a TEMPLATE starts with "#" and goes to the end of line. o If TEMPLATE requires more arguments to pack() than actually given, pack() assumes additional "" arguments. If TEMPLATE requires less arguments to pack() than actually given, extra arguments are ignored. Examples: $foo = pack("CCCC",65,66,67,68); # foo eq "ABCD" $foo = pack("C4",65,66,67,68); # same thing $foo = pack("U4",0x24b6,0x24b7,0x24b8,0x24b9); # same thing with Unicode circled letters $foo = pack("ccxxcc",65,66,67,68); # foo eq "AB\0\0CD" # note: the above examples featuring "C" and "c" are true # only on ASCII and ASCII-derived systems such as ISO Latin 1 # and UTF-8. In EBCDIC the first example would be # $foo = pack("CCCC",193,194,195,196); $foo = pack("s2",1,2); # "\1\0\2\0" on little-endian # "\0\1\0\2" on big-endian $foo = pack("a4","abcd","x","y","z"); # "abcd" $foo = pack("aaaa","abcd","x","y","z"); # "axyz" $foo = pack("a14","abcdefg"); # "abcdefg\0\0\0\0\0\0\0" $foo = pack("i9pl", gmtime); # a real struct tm (on my system anyway) $utmp_template = "Z8 Z8 Z16 L"; $utmp = pack($utmp_template, @utmp1); # a struct utmp (BSDish) @utmp2 = unpack($utmp_template, $utmp); # "@utmp1" eq "@utmp2" sub bintodec { unpack("N", pack("B32", substr("0" x 32 . shift, -32))); } $foo = pack('sx2l', 12, 34); # short 12, two zero bytes padding, long 34 $bar = pack('s@4l', 12, 34); # short 12, zero fill to position 4, long 34 # $foo eq $bar The same template may generally also be used in unpack(). package NAMESPACE package Declares the compilation unit as being in the given namespace. The scope of the package decla- ration is from the declaration itself through the end of the enclosing block, file, or eval (the same as the "my" operator). All further unquali- fied dynamic identifiers will be in this names- pace. A package statement affects only dynamic variables--including those you've used "local" on--but not lexical variables, which are created with "my". Typically it would be the first decla- ration in a file to be included by the "require" or "use" operator. You can switch into a package in more than one place; it merely influences which symbol table is used by the compiler for the rest of that block. You can refer to variables and filehandles in other packages by prefixing the identifier with the package name and a double colon: $Package::Variable. If the package name is null, the "main" package as assumed. That is, $::sail is equivalent to $main::sail (as well as to $main'sail, still seen in older code). If NAMESPACE is omitted, then there is no current package, and all identifiers must be fully quali- fied or lexicals. This is stricter than "use strict", since it also extends to function names. See "Packages" in perlmod for more information about packages, modules, and classes. See perlsub for other scoping issues. pipe READHANDLE,WRITEHANDLE Opens a pair of connected pipes like the corre- sponding system call. Note that if you set up a loop of piped processes, deadlock can occur unless you are very careful. In addition, note that Perl's pipes use stdio buffering, so you may need to set $| to flush your WRITEHANDLE after each command, depending on the application. See IPC::Open2, IPC::Open3, and "Bidirectional Communication" in perlipc for examples of such things. On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set for the newly opened file descriptors as determined by the value of $^F. See "$^F" in perlvar. pop ARRAY pop Pops and returns the last value of the array, shortening the array by one element. Has an effect similar to $ARRAY[$#ARRAY--] If there are no elements in the array, returns the undefined value (although this may happen at other times as well). If ARRAY is omitted, pops the @ARGV array in the main program, and the @_ array in subroutines, just like "shift". pos SCALAR pos Returns the offset of where the last "m//g" search left off for the variable in question ($_ is used when the variable is not specified). May be modi- fied to change that offset. Such modification will also influence the "\G" zero-width assertion in regular expressions. See perlre and perlop. print FILEHANDLE LIST print LIST print Prints a string or a list of strings. Returns true if successful. FILEHANDLE may be a scalar variable name, in which case the variable contains the name of or a reference to the filehandle, thus introducing one level of indirection. (NOTE: If FILEHANDLE is a variable and the next token is a term, it may be misinterpreted as an operator unless you interpose a "+" or put parentheses around the arguments.) If FILEHANDLE is omitted, prints by default to standard output (or to the last selected output channel--see "select"). If LIST is also omitted, prints $_ to the currently selected output channel. To set the default out- put channel to something other than STDOUT use the select operation. The current value of $, (if any) is printed between each LIST item. The cur- rent value of "$\" (if any) is printed after the entire LIST has been printed. Because print takes a LIST, anything in the LIST is evaluated in list context, and any subroutine that you call will have one or more of its expressions evaluated in list context. Also be careful not to follow the print keyword with a left parenthesis unless you want the corresponding right parenthesis to termi- nate the arguments to the print--interpose a "+" or put parentheses around all the arguments. Note that if you're storing FILEHANDLES in an array or other expression, you will have to use a block returning its value instead: print { $files[$i] } "stuff\n"; print { $OK ? STDOUT : STDERR } "stuff\n"; printf FILEHANDLE FORMAT, LIST printf FORMAT, LIST Equivalent to "print FILEHANDLE sprintf(FORMAT, LIST)", except that "$\" (the output record sepa- rator) is not appended. The first argument of the list will be interpreted as the "printf" format. If "use locale" is in effect, the character used for the decimal point in formatted real numbers is affected by the LC_NUMERIC locale. See perllo- cale. Don't fall into the trap of using a "printf" when a simple "print" would do. The "print" is more efficient and less error prone. prototype FUNCTION Returns the prototype of a function as a string (or "undef" if the function has no prototype). FUNCTION is a reference to, or the name of, the function whose prototype you want to retrieve. If FUNCTION is a string starting with "CORE::", the rest is taken as a name for Perl builtin. If the builtin is not overridable (such as "qw//") or its arguments cannot be expressed by a prototype (such as "system") returns "undef" because the builtin does not really behave like a Perl func- tion. Otherwise, the string describing the equiv- alent prototype is returned. push ARRAY,LIST Treats ARRAY as a stack, and pushes the values of LIST onto the end of ARRAY. The length of ARRAY increases by the length of LIST. Has the same effect as for $value (LIST) { $ARRAY[++$#ARRAY] = $value; } but is more efficient. Returns the new number of elements in the array. q/STRING/ qq/STRING/ qr/STRING/ qx/STRING/ qw/STRING/ Generalized quotes. See "Regexp Quote-Like Opera- tors" in perlop. quotemeta EXPR quotemeta Returns the value of EXPR with all non-"word" characters backslashed. (That is, all characters not matching "/[A-Za-z_0-9]/" will be preceded by a backslash in the returned string, regardless of any locale settings.) This is the internal func- tion implementing the "\Q" escape in double-quoted strings. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. rand EXPR rand Returns a random fractional number greater than or equal to 0 and less than the value of EXPR. (EXPR should be positive.) If EXPR is omitted, the value 1 is used. Automatically calls "srand" unless "srand" has already been called. See also "srand". (Note: If your rand function consistently returns numbers that are too large or too small, then your version of Perl was probably compiled with the wrong number of RANDBITS.) read FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET read FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH Attempts to read LENGTH bytes of data into vari- able SCALAR from the specified FILEHANDLE. Returns the number of bytes actually read, 0 at end of file, or undef if there was an error. SCALAR will be grown or shrunk to the length actu- ally read. If SCALAR needs growing, the new bytes will be zero bytes. An OFFSET may be specified to place the read data into some other place in SCALAR than the beginning. The call is actually implemented in terms of stdio's fread(d) call. To get a true read(d) system call, see "sysread". readdir DIRHANDLE Returns the next directory entry for a directory opened by "opendir". If used in list context, returns all the rest of the entries in the direc- tory. If there are no more entries, returns an undefined value in scalar context or a null list in list context. If you're planning to filetest the return values out of a "readdir", you'd better prepend the directory in question. Otherwise, because we didn't "chdir" there, it would have been testing the wrong file. opendir(DIR, $some_dir) || die "can't opendir $some_dir: $!"; @dots = grep { /^\./ && -f "$some_dir/$_" } readdir(r); closedir DIR; readline EXPR Reads from the filehandle whose typeglob is con- tained in EXPR. In scalar context, each call reads and returns the next line, until end-of-file is reached, whereupon the subsequent call returns undef. In list context, reads until end-of-file is reached and returns a list of lines. Note that the notion of "line" used here is however you may have defined it with $/ or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARA- TOR). See "$/" in perlvar. When $/ is set to "undef", when readline() is in scalar context (i.e. file slurp mode), and when an empty file is read, it returns '' the first time, followed by "undef" subsequently. This is the internal function implementing the "<EXPR>" operator, but you can use it directly. The "<EXPR>" operator is discussed in more detail in "I/O Operators" in perlop. $line = <STDIN>; $line = readline(*STDIN); # same thing readlink EXPR readlink Returns the value of a symbolic link, if symbolic links are implemented. If not, gives a fatal error. If there is some system error, returns the undefined value and sets $! (errno). If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. readpipe EXPR EXPR is executed as a system command. The col- lected standard output of the command is returned. In scalar context, it comes back as a single (potentially multi-line) string. In list context, returns a list of lines (however you've defined lines with $/ or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR). This is the internal function implementing the "qx/EXPR/" operator, but you can use it directly. The "qx/EXPR/" operator is discussed in more detail in "I/O Operators" in perlop. recv SOCKET,SCALAR,LENGTH,FLAGS Receives a message on a socket. Attempts to receive LENGTH bytes of data into variable SCALAR from the specified SOCKET filehandle. SCALAR will be grown or shrunk to the length actually read. Takes the same flags as the system call of the same name. Returns the address of the sender if SOCKET's protocol supports this; returns an empty string otherwise. If there's an error, returns the undefined value. This call is actually imple- mented in terms of recvfrom(m) system call. See "UDP: Message Passing" in perlipc for examples. redo LABEL redo The "redo" command restarts the loop block without evaluating the conditional again. The "continue" block, if any, is not executed. If the LABEL is omitted, the command refers to the innermost enclosing loop. This command is normally used by programs that want to lie to themselves about what was just input: # a simpleminded Pascal comment stripper # (warning: assumes no { or } in strings) LINE: while (<STDIN>) { while (s|({.*}.*){.*}|$1 |) {} s|{.*}| |; if (s|{.*| |) { $front = $_; while (<STDIN>) { if (/}/) { # end of comment? s|^|$front\{|; redo LINE; } } } print; } "redo" cannot be used to retry a block which returns a value such as "eval {}", "sub {}" or "do {}", and should not be used to exit a grep() or map() operation. Note that a block by itself is semantically iden- tical to a loop that executes once. Thus "redo" inside such a block will effectively turn it into a looping construct. See also "continue" for an illustration of how "last", "next", and "redo" work. ref EXPR ref Returns a true value if EXPR is a reference, false otherwise. If EXPR is not specified, $_ will be used. The value returned depends on the type of thing the reference is a reference to. Builtin types include: SCALAR ARRAY HASH CODE REF GLOB LVALUE If the referenced object has been blessed into a package, then that package name is returned instead. You can think of "ref" as a "typeof" operator. if (ref($r) eq "HASH") { print "r is a reference to a hash.\n"; } unless (ref($r)) { print "r is not a reference at all.\n"; } if (UNIVERSAL::isa($r, "HASH")) { # for subclassing print "r is a reference to something that isa hash.\n"; } See also perlref. rename OLDNAME,NEWNAME Changes the name of a file; an existing file NEW- NAME will be clobbered. Returns true for success, false otherwise. Behavior of this function varies wildly depending on your system implementation. For example, it will usually not work across file system bound- aries, even though the system mv command sometimes compensates for this. Other restrictions include whether it works on directories, open files, or pre-existing files. Check perlport and either the rename(e) manpage or equivalent system documenta- tion for details. require VERSION require EXPR require Demands some semantics specified by EXPR, or by $_ if EXPR is not supplied. If a VERSION is specified as a literal of the form v5.6.1, demands that the current version of Perl ($^V or $PERL_VERSION) be at least as recent as that version, at run time. (For compatibility with older versions of Perl, a numeric argument will also be interpreted as VERSION.) Compare with "use", which can do a similar check at com- pile time. require v5.6.1; # run time version check require 5.6.1; # ditto require 5.005_03; # float version allowed for compatibility Otherwise, demands that a library file be included if it hasn't already been included. The file is included via the do-FILE mechanism, which is essentially just a variety of "eval". Has seman- tics similar to the following subroutine: sub require { my($filename) = @_; return 1 if $INC{$filename}; my($realfilename,$result); ITER: { foreach $prefix (@INC) { $realfilename = "$prefix/$filename"; if (-f $realfilename) { $INC{$filename} = $realfilename; $result = do $realfilename; last ITER; } } die "Can't find $filename in \@INC"; } delete $INC{$filename} if $@ || !$result; die $@ if $@; die "$filename did not return true value" unless $result; return $result; } Note that the file will not be included twice under the same specified name. The file must return true as the last statement to indicate suc- cessful execution of any initialization code, so it's customary to end such a file with "1;" unless you're sure it'll return true otherwise. But it's better just to put the "1;", in case you add more statements. If EXPR is a bareword, the require assumes a ".pm" extension and replaces "::" with "/" in the file- name for you, to make it easy to load standard modules. This form of loading of modules does not risk altering your namespace. In other words, if you try this: require Foo::Bar; # a splendid bareword The require function will actually look for the "Foo/Bar.pm" file in the directories specified in the @INC array. But if you try this: $class = 'Foo::Bar'; require $class; # $class is not a bareword #or require "Foo::Bar"; # not a bareword because of the "" The require function will look for the "Foo::Bar" file in the @INC array and will complain about not finding "Foo::Bar" there. In this case you can do: eval "require $class"; For a yet-more-powerful import facility, see "use" and perlmod. reset EXPR reset Generally used in a "continue" block at the end of a loop to clear variables and reset "??" searches so that they work again. The expression is inter- preted as a list of single characters (hyphens allowed for ranges). All variables and arrays beginning with one of those letters are reset to their pristine state. If the expression is omit- ted, one-match searches ("?pattern?") are reset to match again. Resets only variables or searches in the current package. Always returns 1. Examples: reset 'X'; # reset all X variables reset 'a-z'; # reset lower case variables reset; # just reset ?one-time? searches Resetting "A-Z" is not recommended because you'll wipe out your @ARGV and @INC arrays and your %ENV hash. Resets only package variables--lexical variables are unaffected, but they clean them- selves up on scope exit anyway, so you'll probably want to use them instead. See "my". return EXPR return Returns from a subroutine, "eval", or "do FILE" with the value given in EXPR. Evaluation of EXPR may be in list, scalar, or void context, depending on how the return value will be used, and the con- text may vary from one execution to the next (see "wantarray"). If no EXPR is given, returns an empty list in list context, the undefined value in scalar context, and (of course) nothing at all in a void context. (Note that in the absence of a explicit "return", a subroutine, eval, or do FILE will automatically return the value of the last expression evalu- ated.) reverse LIST In list context, returns a list value consisting of the elements of LIST in the opposite order. In scalar context, concatenates the elements of LIST and returns a string value with all characters in the opposite order. print reverse <>; # line tac, last line first undef $/; # for efficiency of <> print scalar reverse <>; # character tac, last line tsrif This operator is also handy for inverting a hash, although there are some caveats. If a value is duplicated in the original hash, only one of those can be represented as a key in the inverted hash. Also, this has to unwind one hash and build a whole new one, which may take some time on a large hash, such as from a DBM file. %by_name = reverse %by_address; # Invert the hash rewinddir DIRHANDLE Sets the current position to the beginning of the directory for the "readdir" routine on DIRHANDLE. rindex STR,SUBSTR,POSITION rindex STR,SUBSTR Works just like index() except that it returns the position of the LAST occurrence of SUBSTR in STR. If POSITION is specified, returns the last occurrence at or before that position. rmdir FILENAME rmdir Deletes the directory specified by FILENAME if that directory is empty. If it succeeds it returns true, otherwise it returns false and sets $! (errno). If FILENAME is omitted, uses $_. s/// The substitution operator. See perlop. scalar EXPR Forces EXPR to be interpreted in scalar context and returns the value of EXPR. @counts = ( scalar @a, scalar @b, scalar @c ); There is no equivalent operator to force an expression to be interpolated in list context because in practice, this is never needed. If you really wanted to do so, however, you could use the construction "@{[ (some expression) ]}", but usu- ally a simple "(some expression)" suffices. Because "scalar" is unary operator, if you acci- dentally use for EXPR a parenthesized list, this behaves as a scalar comma expression, evaluating all but the last element in void context and returning the final element evaluated in scalar context. This is seldom what you want. The following single statement: print uc(scalar(&foo,$bar)),$baz; is the moral equivalent of these two: &foo; print(uc($bar),$baz); See perlop for more details on unary operators and the comma operator. seek FILEHANDLE,POSITION,WHENCE Sets FILEHANDLE's position, just like the "fseek" call of "stdio". FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the filehandle. The values for WHENCE are 0 to set the new position to POSITION, 1 to set it to the current position plus POSITION, and 2 to set it to EOF plus POSITION (typically negative). For WHENCE you may use the constants "SEEK_SET", "SEEK_CUR", and "SEEK_END" (start of the file, current position, end of the file) from the Fcntl module. Returns 1 upon suc- cess, 0 otherwise. If you want to position file for "sysread" or "syswrite", don't use "seek"--buffering makes its effect on the file's system position unpredictable and non-portable. Use "sysseek" instead. Due to the rules and rigors of ANSI C, on some systems you have to do a seek whenever you switch between reading and writing. Amongst other things, this may have the effect of calling stdio's clearerr(r). A WHENCE of 1 ("SEEK_CUR") is useful for not moving the file position: seek(TEST,0,1); This is also useful for applications emulating "tail -f". Once you hit EOF on your read, and then sleep for a while, you might have to stick in a seek() to reset things. The "seek" doesn't change the current position, but it does clear the end-of-file condition on the handle, so that the next "<FILE>" makes Perl try again to read some- thing. We hope. If that doesn't work (some stdios are particularly cantankerous), then you may need something more like this: for (;;) { for ($curpos = tell(l); $_ = <FILE>; $curpos = tell(l)) { # search for some stuff and put it into files } sleep($for_a_while); seek(FILE, $curpos, 0); } seekdir DIRHANDLE,POS Sets the current position for the "readdir" rou- tine on DIRHANDLE. POS must be a value returned by "telldir". Has the same caveats about possible directory compaction as the corresponding system library routine. select FILEHANDLE select Returns the currently selected filehandle. Sets the current default filehandle for output, if FILEHANDLE is supplied. This has two effects: first, a "write" or a "print" without a filehandle will default to this FILEHANDLE. Second, refer- ences to variables related to output will refer to this output channel. For example, if you have to set the top of form format for more than one out- put channel, you might do the following: select(t); $^ = 'report1_top'; select(t); $^ = 'report2_top'; FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the actual filehandle. Thus: $oldfh = select(t); $| = 1; select($oldfh); Some programmers may prefer to think of filehan- dles as objects with methods, preferring to write the last example as: use IO::Handle; STDERR->autoflush(h); select RBITS,WBITS,EBITS,TIMEOUT This calls the select(t) system call with the bit masks specified, which can be constructed using "fileno" and "vec", along these lines: $rin = $win = $ein = ''; vec($rin,fileno(o),1) = 1; vec($win,fileno(o),1) = 1; $ein = $rin | $win; If you want to select on many filehandles you might wish to write a subroutine: sub fhbits { my(@fhlist) = split(' ',$_[0]); my($bits); for (@fhlist) { vec($bits,fileno($_),1) = 1; } $bits; } $rin = fhbits('STDIN TTY SOCK'); The usual idiom is: ($nfound,$timeleft) = select($rout=$rin, $wout=$win, $eout=$ein, $timeout); or to block until something becomes ready just do this $nfound = select($rout=$rin, $wout=$win, $eout=$ein, undef); Most systems do not bother to return anything use- ful in $timeleft, so calling select() in scalar context just returns $nfound. Any of the bit masks can also be undef. The time- out, if specified, is in seconds, which may be fractional. Note: not all implementations are capable of returning the$timeleft. If not, they always return $timeleft equal to the supplied $timeout. You can effect a sleep of 250 milliseconds this way: select(undef, undef, undef, 0.25); WARNING: One should not attempt to mix buffered I/O (like "read" or <FH>) with "select", except as permitted by POSIX, and even then only on POSIX systems. You have to use "sysread" instead. semctl ID,SEMNUM,CMD,ARG Calls the System V IPC function "semctl". You'll probably have to say use IPC::SysV; first to get the correct constant definitions. If CMD is IPC_STAT or GETALL, then ARG must be a variable which will hold the returned semid_ds structure or semaphore value array. Returns like "ioctl": the undefined value for error, ""0 but true"" for zero, or the actual return value other- wise. The ARG must consist of a vector of native short integers, which may be created with "pack("s!",(0)x$nsem)". See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc, "IPC::SysV", "IPC::Semaphore" documentation. semget KEY,NSEMS,FLAGS Calls the System V IPC function semget. Returns the semaphore id, or the undefined value if there is an error. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc, "IPC::SysV", "IPC::SysV::Semaphore" documentation. semop KEY,OPSTRING Calls the System V IPC function semop to perform semaphore operations such as signaling and wait- ing. OPSTRING must be a packed array of semop structures. Each semop structure can be generated with "pack("sss", $semnum, $semop, $semflag)". The number of semaphore operations is implied by the length of OPSTRING. Returns true if success- ful, or false if there is an error. As an exam- ple, the following code waits on semaphore $semnum of semaphore id $semid: $semop = pack("sss", $semnum, -1, 0); die "Semaphore trouble: $!\n" unless semop($semid, $semop); To signal the semaphore, replace "-1" with 1. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc, "IPC::SysV", and "IPC::SysV::Semaphore" documentation. send SOCKET,MSG,FLAGS,TO send SOCKET,MSG,FLAGS Sends a message on a socket. Takes the same flags as the system call of the same name. On uncon- nected sockets you must specify a destination to send TO, in which case it does a C "sendto". Returns the number of characters sent, or the undefined value if there is an error. The C sys- tem call sendmsg(g) is currently unimplemented. See "UDP: Message Passing" in perlipc for exam- ples. setpgrp PID,PGRP Sets the current process group for the specified PID, 0 for the current process. Will produce a fatal error if used on a machine that doesn't implement POSIX setpgid(d) or BSD setpgrp(p). If the arguments are omitted, it defaults to "0,0". Note that the BSD 4.2 version of "setpgrp" does not accept any arguments, so only "setpgrp(0,0)" is portable. See also "POSIX::setsid()". setpriority WHICH,WHO,PRIORITY Sets the current priority for a process, a process group, or a user. (See setpriority(y).) Will produce a fatal error if used on a machine that doesn't implement setpriority(y). setsockopt SOCKET,LEVEL,OPTNAME,OPTVAL Sets the socket option requested. Returns unde- fined if there is an error. OPTVAL may be speci- fied as "undef" if you don't want to pass an argu- ment. shift ARRAY shift Shifts the first value of the array off and returns it, shortening the array by 1 and moving everything down. If there are no elements in the array, returns the undefined value. If ARRAY is omitted, shifts the @_ array within the lexical scope of subroutines and formats, and the @ARGV array at file scopes or within the lexical scopes established by the "eval ''", "BEGIN {}", "INIT {}", "CHECK {}", and "END {}" constructs. See also "unshift", "push", and "pop". "shift" and "unshift" do the same thing to the left end of an array that "pop" and "push" do to the right end. shmctl ID,CMD,ARG Calls the System V IPC function shmctl. You'll probably have to say use IPC::SysV; first to get the correct constant definitions. If CMD is "IPC_STAT", then ARG must be a variable which will hold the returned "shmid_ds" structure. Returns like ioctl: the undefined value for error, "0 but true" for zero, or the actual return value otherwise. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc and "IPC::SysV" documentation. shmget KEY,SIZE,FLAGS Calls the System V IPC function shmget. Returns the shared memory segment id, or the undefined value if there is an error. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc and "IPC::SysV" documentation. shmread ID,VAR,POS,SIZE shmwrite ID,STRING,POS,SIZE Reads or writes the System V shared memory segment ID starting at position POS for size SIZE by attaching to it, copying in/out, and detaching from it. When reading, VAR must be a variable that will hold the data read. When writing, if STRING is too long, only SIZE bytes are used; if STRING is too short, nulls are written to fill out SIZE bytes. Return true if successful, or false if there is an error. shmread() taints the vari- able. See also "SysV IPC" in perlipc, "IPC::SysV" documentation, and the "IPC::Shareable" module from CPAN. shutdown SOCKET,HOW Shuts down a socket connection in the manner indi- cated by HOW, which has the same interpretation as in the system call of the same name. shutdown(SOCKET, 0); # I/we have stopped reading data shutdown(SOCKET, 1); # I/we have stopped writing data shutdown(SOCKET, 2); # I/we have stopped using this socket This is useful with sockets when you want to tell the other side you're done writing but not done reading, or vice versa. It's also a more insis- tent form of close because it also disables the file descriptor in any forked copies in other pro- cesses. sin EXPR sin Returns the sine of EXPR (expressed in radians). If EXPR is omitted, returns sine of $_. For the inverse sine operation, you may use the "Math::Trig::asin" function, or use this relation: sub asin { atan2($_[0], sqrt(1 - $_[0] * $_[0])) } sleep EXPR sleep Causes the script to sleep for EXPR seconds, or forever if no EXPR. May be interrupted if the process receives a signal such as "SIGALRM". Returns the number of seconds actually slept. You probably cannot mix "alarm" and "sleep" calls, because "sleep" is often implemented using "alarm". On some older systems, it may sleep up to a full second less than what you requested, depending on how it counts seconds. Most modern systems always sleep the full amount. They may appear to sleep longer than that, however, because your process might not be scheduled right away in a busy multi- tasking system. For delays of finer granularity than one second, you may use Perl's "syscall" interface to access setitimer(r) if your system supports it, or else see "select" above. The Time::HiRes module from CPAN may also help. See also the POSIX module's "pause" function. socket SOCKET,DOMAIN,TYPE,PROTOCOL Opens a socket of the specified kind and attaches it to filehandle SOCKET. DOMAIN, TYPE, and PROTO- COL are specified the same as for the system call of the same name. You should "use Socket" first to get the proper definitions imported. See the examples in "Sockets: Client/Server Communication" in perlipc. On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set for the newly opened file descriptor, as determined by the value of $^F. See "$^F" in perlvar. socketpair SOCKET1,SOCKET2,DOMAIN,TYPE,PROTOCOL Creates an unnamed pair of sockets in the speci- fied domain, of the specified type. DOMAIN, TYPE, and PROTOCOL are specified the same as for the system call of the same name. If unimplemented, yields a fatal error. Returns true if successful. On systems that support a close-on-exec flag on files, the flag will be set for the newly opened file descriptors, as determined by the value of $^F. See "$^F" in perlvar. Some systems defined "pipe" in terms of "socket- pair", in which a call to "pipe(Rdr, Wtr)" is essentially: use Socket; socketpair(Rdr, Wtr, AF_UNIX, SOCK_STREAM, PF_UNSPEC); shutdown(Rdr, 1); # no more writing for reader shutdown(Wtr, 0); # no more reading for writer See perlipc for an example of socketpair use. sort SUBNAME LIST sort BLOCK LIST sort LIST Sorts the LIST and returns the sorted list value. If SUBNAME or BLOCK is omitted, "sort"s in stan- dard string comparison order. If SUBNAME is spec- ified, it gives the name of a subroutine that returns an integer less than, equal to, or greater than 0, depending on how the elements of the list are to be ordered. (The "<=>" and "cmp" operators are extremely useful in such routines.) SUBNAME may be a scalar variable name (unsubscripted), in which case the value provides the name of (or a reference to) the actual subroutine to use. In place of a SUBNAME, you can provide a BLOCK as an anonymous, in-line sort subroutine. If the subroutine's prototype is "($$)", the ele- ments to be compared are passed by reference in @_, as for a normal subroutine. This is slower than unprototyped subroutines, where the elements to be compared are passed into the subroutine as the package global variables $a and $b (see exam- ple below). Note that in the latter case, it is usually counter-productive to declare $a and $b as lexicals. In either case, the subroutine may not be recur- sive. The values to be compared are always passed by reference, so don't modify them. You also cannot exit out of the sort block or sub- routine using any of the loop control operators described in perlsyn or with "goto". When "use locale" is in effect, "sort LIST" sorts LIST according to the current collation locale. See perllocale. Examples: # sort lexically @articles = sort @files; # same thing, but with explicit sort routine @articles = sort {$a cmp $b} @files; # now case-insensitively @articles = sort {uc($a) cmp uc($b)} @files; # same thing in reversed order @articles = sort {$b cmp $a} @files; # sort numerically ascending @articles = sort {$a <=> $b} @files; # sort numerically descending @articles = sort {$b <=> $a} @files; # this sorts the %age hash by value instead of key # using an in-line function @eldest = sort { $age{$b} <=> $age{$a} } keys %age; # sort using explicit subroutine name sub byage { $age{$a} <=> $age{$b}; # presuming numeric } @sortedclass = sort byage @class; sub backwards { $b cmp $a } @harry = qw(dog cat x Cain Abel); @george = qw(gone chased yz Punished Axed); print sort @harry; # prints AbelCaincatdogx print sort backwards @harry; # prints xdogcatCainAbel print sort @george, 'to', @harry; # prints AbelAxedCainPunishedcatchaseddoggonetoxyz # inefficiently sort by descending numeric compare using # the first integer after the first = sign, or the # whole record case-insensitively otherwise @new = sort { ($b =~ /=(\d+)/)[0] <=> ($a =~ /=(\d+)/)[0] || uc($a) cmp uc($b) } @old; # same thing, but much more efficiently; # we'll build auxiliary indices instead # for speed @nums = @caps = (); for (@old) { push @nums, /=(\d+)/; push @caps, uc($_); } @new = @old[ sort { $nums[$b] <=> $nums[$a] || $caps[$a] cmp $caps[$b] } 0..$#old ]; # same thing, but without any temps @new = map { $_->[0] } sort { $b->[1] <=> $a->[1] || $a->[2] cmp $b->[2] } map { [$_, /=(\d+)/, uc($_)] } @old; # using a prototype allows you to use any comparison subroutine # as a sort subroutine (including other package's subroutines) package other; sub backwards ($$) { $_[1] cmp $_[0]; } # $a and $b are not set here package main; @new = sort other::backwards @old; If you're using strict, you must not declare $a and $b as lexicals. They are package globals. That means if you're in the "main" package and type @articles = sort {$b <=> $a} @files; then $a and $b are $main::a and $main::b (or $::a and $::b), but if you're in the "FooPack" package, it's the same as typing @articles = sort {$FooPack::b <=> $FooPack::a} @files; The comparison function is required to behave. If it returns inconsistent results (sometimes saying $x[1] is less than $x[2] and sometimes saying the opposite, for example) the results are not well-defined. splice ARRAY,OFFSET,LENGTH,LIST splice ARRAY,OFFSET,LENGTH splice ARRAY,OFFSET splice ARRAY Removes the elements designated by OFFSET and LENGTH from an array, and replaces them with the elements of LIST, if any. In list context, returns the elements removed from the array. In scalar context, returns the last element removed, or "undef" if no elements are removed. The array grows or shrinks as necessary. If OFFSET is nega- tive then it starts that far from the end of the array. If LENGTH is omitted, removes everything from OFFSET onward. If LENGTH is negative, leaves that many elements off the end of the array. If both OFFSET and LENGTH are omitted, removes every- thing. The following equivalences hold (assuming "$[ == 0"): push(@a,$x,$y) splice(@a,@a,0,$x,$y) pop(@a) splice(@a,-1) shift(@a) splice(@a,0,1) unshift(@a,$x,$y) splice(@a,0,0,$x,$y) $a[$x] = $y splice(@a,$x,1,$y) Example, assuming array lengths are passed before arrays: sub aeq { # compare two list values my(@a) = splice(@_,0,shift); my(@b) = splice(@_,0,shift); return 0 unless @a == @b; # same len? while (@a) { return 0 if pop(@a) ne pop(@b); } return 1; } if (&aeq($len,@foo[1..$len],0+@bar,@bar)) { ... } split /PATTERN/,EXPR,LIMIT split /PATTERN/,EXPR split /PATTERN/ split Splits a string into a list of strings and returns that list. By default, empty leading fields are preserved, and empty trailing ones are deleted. In scalar context, returns the number of fields found and splits into the @_ array. Use of split in scalar context is deprecated, however, because it clobbers your subroutine arguments. If EXPR is omitted, splits the $_ string. If PAT- TERN is also omitted, splits on whitespace (after skipping any leading whitespace). Anything match- ing PATTERN is taken to be a delimiter separating the fields. (Note that the delimiter may be longer than one character.) If LIMIT is specified and positive, splits into no more than that many fields (though it may split into fewer). If LIMIT is unspecified or zero, trailing null fields are stripped (which potential users of "pop" would do well to remember). If LIMIT is negative, it is treated as if an arbi- trarily large LIMIT had been specified. A pattern matching the null string (not to be con- fused with a null pattern "//", which is just one member of the set of patterns matching a null string) will split the value of EXPR into separate characters at each point it matches that way. For example: print join(':', split(/ */, 'hi there')); produces the output 'h:i:t:h:e:r:e'. Empty leading (or trailing) fields are produced when there are positive width matches at the beginning (or end) of the string; a zero-width match at the beginning (or end) of the string does not produce an empty field. For example: print join(':', split(/(?=\w)/, 'hi there!')); produces the output 'h:i :t:h:e:r:e!'. The LIMIT parameter can be used to split a line partially ($login, $passwd, $remainder) = split(/:/, $_, 3); When assigning to a list, if LIMIT is omitted, Perl supplies a LIMIT one larger than the number of variables in the list, to avoid unnecessary work. For the list above LIMIT would have been 4 by default. In time critical applications it behooves you not to split into more fields than you really need. If the PATTERN contains parentheses, additional list elements are created from each matching sub- string in the delimiter. split(/([,-])/, "1-10,20", 3); produces the list value (1, '-', 10, ',', 20) If you had the entire header of a normal Unix email message in $header, you could split it up into fields and their values this way: $header =~ s/\n\s+/ /g; # fix continuation lines %hdrs = (UNIX_FROM => split /^(\S*?):\s*/m, $header); The pattern "/PATTERN/" may be replaced with an expression to specify patterns that vary at runtime. (To do runtime compilation only once, use "/$variable/o".) As a special case, specifying a PATTERN of space (' ') will split on white space just as "split" with no arguments does. Thus, "split(' ')" can be used to emulate awk's default behavior, whereas "split(/ /)" will give you as many null initial fields as there are leading spaces. A "split" on "/\s+/" is like a "split(' ')" except that any leading whitespace produces a null first field. A "split" with no arguments really does a "split(' ', $_)" internally. A PATTERN of "/^/" is treated as if it were "/^/m", since it isn't much use otherwise. Example: open(PASSWD, '/etc/passwd'); while (<PASSWD>) { chomp; ($login, $passwd, $uid, $gid, $gcos, $home, $shell) = split(/:/); #... } sprintf FORMAT, LIST Returns a string formatted by the usual "printf" conventions of the C library function "sprintf". See below for more details and see sprintf(f) or printf(f) on your system for an explanation of the general principles. For example: # Format number with up to 8 leading zeroes $result = sprintf("%08d", $number); # Round number to 3 digits after decimal point $rounded = sprintf("%.3f", $number); Perl does its own "sprintf" formatting--it emu- lates the C function "sprintf", but it doesn't use it (except for floating-point numbers, and even then only the standard modifiers are allowed). As a result, any non-standard extensions in your local "sprintf" are not available from Perl. Unlike "printf", "sprintf" does not do what you probably mean when you pass it an array as your first argument. The array is given scalar context, and instead of using the 0th element of the array as the format, Perl will use the count of elements in the array as the format, which is almost never useful. Perl's "sprintf" permits the following univer- sally-known conversions: %% a percent sign %c a character with the given number %s a string %d a signed integer, in decimal %u an unsigned integer, in decimal %o an unsigned integer, in octal %x an unsigned integer, in hexadecimal %e a floating-point number, in scientific notation %f a floating-point number, in fixed decimal notation %g a floating-point number, in %e or %f notation In addition, Perl permits the following widely- supported conversions: %X like %x, but using upper-case letters %E like %e, but using an upper-case "E" %G like %g, but with an upper-case "E" (if applicable) %b an unsigned integer, in binary %p a pointer (outputs the Perl value's address in hexadecimal) %n special: *stores* the number of characters output so far into the next variable in the parameter list Finally, for backward (and we do mean "backward") compatibility, Perl permits these unnecessary but widely-supported conversions: %i a synonym for %d %D a synonym for %ld %U a synonym for %lu %O a synonym for %lo %F a synonym for %f Note that the number of exponent digits in the scientific notation by %e, %E, %g and %G for num- bers with the modulus of the exponent less than 100 is system-dependent: it may be three or less (zero-padded as necessary). In other words, 1.23 times ten to the 99th may be either "1.23e99" or "1.23e099". Perl permits the following universally-known flags between the "%" and the conversion letter: space prefix positive number with a space + prefix positive number with a plus sign - left-justify within the field 0 use zeros, not spaces, to right-justify # prefix non-zero octal with "0", non-zero hex with "0x" number minimum field width .number "precision": digits after decimal point for floating-point, max length for string, minimum length for integer l interpret integer as C type "long" or "unsigned long" h interpret integer as C type "short" or "unsigned short" If no flags, interpret integer as C type "int" or "unsigned" There are also two Perl-specific flags: V interpret integer as Perl's standard integer type v interpret string as a vector of integers, output as numbers separated either by dots, or by an arbitrary string received from the argument list when the flag is preceded by C<*> Where a number would appear in the flags, an asterisk ("*") may be used instead, in which case Perl uses the next item in the parameter list as the given number (that is, as the field width or precision). If a field width obtained through "*" is negative, it has the same effect as the "-" flag: left-justification. The "v" flag is useful for displaying ordinal val- ues of characters in arbitrary strings: printf "version is v%vd\n", $^V; # Perl's version printf "address is %*vX\n", ":", $addr; # IPv6 address printf "bits are %*vb\n", " ", $bits; # random bitstring If "use locale" is in effect, the character used for the decimal point in formatted real numbers is affected by the LC_NUMERIC locale. See perllo- cale. If Perl understands "quads" (64-bit integers) (this requires either that the platform natively support quads or that Perl be specifically com- piled to support quads), the characters d u o x X b i D U O print quads, and they may optionally be preceded by ll L q For example %lld %16LX %qo You can find out whether your Perl supports quads via Config: use Config; ($Config{use64bitint} eq 'define' || $Config{longsize} == 8) && print "quads\n"; If Perl understands "long doubles" (this requires that the platform support long doubles), the flags e f g E F G may optionally be preceded by ll L For example %llf %Lg You can find out whether your Perl supports long doubles via Config: use Config; $Config{d_longdbl} eq 'define' && print "long doubles\n"; sqrt EXPR sqrt Return the square root of EXPR. If EXPR is omit- ted, returns square root of $_. Only works on non-negative operands, unless you've loaded the standard Math::Complex module. use Math::Complex; print sqrt(-2); # prints 1.4142135623731i srand EXPR srand Sets the random number seed for the "rand" opera- tor. If EXPR is omitted, uses a semi-random value supplied by the kernel (if it supports the /dev/urandom device) or based on the current time and process ID, among other things. In versions of Perl prior to 5.004 the default seed was just the current "time". This isn't a particularly good seed, so many old programs supply their own seed value (often "time ^ $$" or "time ^ ($$ + ($$ << 15))"), but that isn't necessary any more. In fact, it's usually not necessary to call "srand" at all, because if it is not called explicitly, it is called implicitly at the first use of the "rand" operator. However, this was not the case in version of Perl before 5.004, so if your script will run under older Perl versions, it should call "srand". Note that you need something much more random than the default seed for cryptographic purposes. Checksumming the compressed output of one or more rapidly changing operating system status programs is the usual method. For example: srand (time ^ $$ ^ unpack "%L*", `ps axww | gzip`); If you're particularly concerned with this, see the "Math::TrulyRandom" module in CPAN. Do not call "srand" multiple times in your program unless you know exactly what you're doing and why you're doing it. The point of the function is to "seed" the "rand" function so that "rand" can pro- duce a different sequence each time you run your program. Just do it once at the top of your pro- gram, or you won't get random numbers out of "rand"! Frequently called programs (like CGI scripts) that simply use time ^ $$ for a seed can fall prey to the mathematical prop- erty that a^b == (a+1)^(b+1) one-third of the time. So don't do that. stat FILEHANDLE stat EXPR stat Returns a 13-element list giving the status info for a file, either the file opened via FILEHANDLE, or named by EXPR. If EXPR is omitted, it stats $_. Returns a null list if the stat fails. Typi- cally used as follows: ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size, $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat($filename); Not all fields are supported on all filesystem types. Here are the meaning of the fields: 0 dev device number of filesystem 1 ino inode number 2 mode file mode (type and permissions) 3 nlink number of (hard) links to the file 4 uid numeric user ID of file's owner 5 gid numeric group ID of file's owner 6 rdev the device identifier (special files only) 7 size total size of file, in bytes 8 atime last access time in seconds since the epoch 9 mtime last modify time in seconds since the epoch 10 ctime inode change time (NOT creation time!) in seconds since the epoch 11 blksize preferred block size for file system I/O 12 blocks actual number of blocks allocated (The epoch was at 00:00 January 1, 1970 GMT.) If stat is passed the special filehandle consist- ing of an underline, no stat is done, but the cur- rent contents of the stat structure from the last stat or filetest are returned. Example: if (-x $file && (($d) = stat(_)) && $d < 0) { print "$file is executable NFS file\n"; } (This works on machines only for which the device number is negative under NFS.) Because the mode contains both the file type and its permissions, you should mask off the file type portion and (s)printf using a "%o" if you want to see the real permissions. $mode = (stat($filename))[2]; printf "Permissions are %04o\n", $mode & 07777; In scalar context, "stat" returns a boolean value indicating success or failure, and, if successful, sets the information associated with the special filehandle "_". The File::stat module provides a convenient, by- name access mechanism: use File::stat; $sb = stat($filename); printf "File is %s, size is %s, perm %04o, mtime %s\n", $filename, $sb->size, $sb->mode & 07777, scalar localtime $sb->mtime; You can import symbolic mode constants ("S_IF*") and functions ("S_IS*") from the Fcntl module: use Fcntl ':mode'; $mode = (stat($filename))[2]; $user_rwx = ($mode & S_IRWXU) >> 6; $group_read = ($mode & S_IRGRP) >> 3; $other_execute = $mode & S_IXOTH; printf "Permissions are %04o\n", S_ISMODE($mode), "\n"; $is_setuid = $mode & S_ISUID; $is_setgid = S_ISDIR($mode); You could write the last two using the "-u" and "-d" operators. The commonly available S_IF* con- stants are # Permissions: read, write, execute, for user, group, others. S_IRWXU S_IRUSR S_IWUSR S_IXUSR S_IRWXG S_IRGRP S_IWGRP S_IXGRP S_IRWXO S_IROTH S_IWOTH S_IXOTH # Setuid/Setgid/Stickiness. S_ISUID S_ISGID S_ISVTX S_ISTXT # File types. Not necessarily all are available on your system. S_IFREG S_IFDIR S_IFLNK S_IFBLK S_ISCHR S_IFIFO S_IFSOCK S_IFWHT S_ENFMT # The following are compatibility aliases for S_IRUSR, S_IWUSR, S_IXUSR. S_IREAD S_IWRITE S_IEXEC and the S_IF* functions are S_IFMODE($mode) the part of $mode containing the permission bits and the setuid/setgid/sticky bits S_IFMT($mode) the part of $mode containing the file type which can be bit-anded with e.g. S_IFREG or with the following functions # The operators -f, -d, -l, -b, -c, -p, and -s. S_ISREG($mode) S_ISDIR($mode) S_ISLNK($mode) S_ISBLK($mode) S_ISCHR($mode) S_ISFIFO($mode) S_ISSOCK($mode) # No direct -X operator counterpart, but for the first one # the -g operator is often equivalent. The ENFMT stands for # record flocking enforcement, a platform-dependent feature. S_ISENFMT($mode) S_ISWHT($mode) See your native chmod(d) and stat(t) documentation for more details about the S_* constants. study SCALAR study Takes extra time to study SCALAR ($_ if unspeci- fied) in anticipation of doing many pattern matches on the string before it is next modified. This may or may not save time, depending on the nature and number of patterns you are searching on, and on the distribution of character frequen- cies in the string to be searched--you probably want to compare run times with and without it to see which runs faster. Those loops which scan for many short constant strings (including the con- stant parts of more complex patterns) will benefit most. You may have only one "study" active at a time--if you study a different scalar the first is "unstudied". (The way "study" works is this: a linked list of every character in the string to be searched is made, so we know, for example, where all the 'k' characters are. From each search string, the rarest character is selected, based on some static frequency tables constructed from some C programs and English text. Only those places that contain this "rarest" character are exam- ined.) For example, here is a loop that inserts index producing entries before any line containing a certain pattern: while (<>) { study; print ".IX foo\n" if /\bfoo\b/; print ".IX bar\n" if /\bbar\b/; print ".IX blurfl\n" if /\bblurfl\b/; # ... print; } In searching for "/\bfoo\b/", only those locations in $_ that contain "f" will be looked at, because "f" is rarer than "o". In general, this is a big win except in pathological cases. The only ques- tion is whether it saves you more time than it took to build the linked list in the first place. Note that if you have to look for strings that you don't know till runtime, you can build an entire loop as a string and "eval" that to avoid recom- piling all your patterns all the time. Together with undefining $/ to input entire files as one record, this can be very fast, often faster than specialized programs like fgrep(p). The following scans a list of files (@files) for a list of words (@words), and prints out the names of those files that contain a match: $search = 'while (<>) { study;'; foreach $word (@words) { $search .= "++\$seen{\$ARGV} if /\\b$word\\b/;\n"; } $search .= "}"; @ARGV = @files; undef $/; eval $search; # this screams $/ = "\n"; # put back to normal input delimiter foreach $file (sort keys(%seen)) { print $file, "\n"; } sub BLOCK sub NAME sub NAME BLOCK This is subroutine definition, not a real function per se. With just a NAME (and possibly prototypes or attributes), it's just a forward declaration. Without a NAME, it's an anonymous function decla- ration, and does actually return a value: the CODE ref of the closure you just created. See perlsub and perlref for details. substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH,REPLACEMENT substr EXPR,OFFSET,LENGTH substr EXPR,OFFSET Extracts a substring out of EXPR and returns it. First character is at offset 0, or whatever you've set $[ to (but don't do that). If OFFSET is nega- tive (or more precisely, less than $[), starts that far from the end of the string. If LENGTH is omitted, returns everything to the end of the string. If LENGTH is negative, leaves that many characters off the end of the string. You can use the substr() function as an lvalue, in which case EXPR must itself be an lvalue. If you assign something shorter than LENGTH, the string will shrink, and if you assign something longer than LENGTH, the string will grow to accommodate it. To keep the string the same length you may need to pad or chop your value using "sprintf". If OFFSET and LENGTH specify a substring that is partly outside the string, only the part within the string is returned. If the substring is beyond either end of the string, substr() returns the undefined value and produces a warning. When used as an lvalue, specifying a substring that is entirely outside the string is a fatal error. Here's an example showing the behavior for bound- ary cases: my $name = 'fred'; substr($name, 4) = 'dy'; # $name is now 'freddy' my $null = substr $name, 6, 2; # returns '' (no warning) my $oops = substr $name, 7; # returns undef, with warning substr($name, 7) = 'gap'; # fatal error An alternative to using substr() as an lvalue is to specify the replacement string as the 4th argu- ment. This allows you to replace parts of the EXPR and return what was there before in one oper- ation, just as you can with splice(). symlink OLDFILE,NEWFILE Creates a new filename symbolically linked to the old filename. Returns 1 for success, 0 otherwise. On systems that don't support symbolic links, pro- duces a fatal error at run time. To check for that, use eval: $symlink_exists = eval { symlink("",""); 1 }; syscall LIST Calls the system call specified as the first ele- ment of the list, passing the remaining elements as arguments to the system call. If unimple- mented, produces a fatal error. The arguments are interpreted as follows: if a given argument is numeric, the argument is passed as an int. If not, the pointer to the string value is passed. You are responsible to make sure a string is pre- extended long enough to receive any result that might be written into a string. You can't use a string literal (or other read-only string) as an argument to "syscall" because Perl has to assume that any string pointer might be written through. If your integer arguments are not literals and have never been interpreted in a numeric context, you may need to add 0 to them to force them to look like numbers. This emulates the "syswrite" function (or vice versa): require 'syscall.ph'; # may need to run h2ph $s = "hi there\n"; syscall(&SYS_write, fileno(o), $s, length $s); Note that Perl supports passing of up to only 14 arguments to your system call, which in practice should usually suffice. Syscall returns whatever value returned by the system call it calls. If the system call fails, "syscall" returns "-1" and sets $! (errno). Note that some system calls can legitimately return "-1". The proper way to handle such calls is to assign "$!=0;" before the call and check the value of $! if syscall returns "-1". There's a problem with "syscall(&SYS_pipe)": it returns the file number of the read end of the pipe it creates. There is no way to retrieve the file number of the other end. You can avoid this problem by using "pipe" instead. sysopen FILEHANDLE,FILENAME,MODE sysopen FILEHANDLE,FILENAME,MODE,PERMS Opens the file whose filename is given by FILE- NAME, and associates it with FILEHANDLE. If FILE- HANDLE is an expression, its value is used as the name of the real filehandle wanted. This function calls the underlying operating system's "open" function with the parameters FILENAME, MODE, PERMS. The possible values and flag bits of the MODE parameter are system-dependent; they are available via the standard module "Fcntl". See the documen- tation of your operating system's "open" to see which values and flag bits are available. You may combine several flags using the "|"-operator. Some of the most common values are "O_RDONLY" for opening the file in read-only mode, "O_WRONLY" for opening the file in write-only mode, and "O_RDWR" for opening the file in read-write mode, and. For historical reasons, some values work on almost every system supported by perl: zero means read-only, one means write-only, and two means read/write. We know that these values do not work under OS/390 & VM/ESA Unix and on the Macintosh; you probably don't want to use them in new code. If the file named by FILENAME does not exist and the "open" call creates it (typically because MODE includes the "O_CREAT" flag), then the value of PERMS specifies the permissions of the newly cre- ated file. If you omit the PERMS argument to "sysopen", Perl uses the octal value 0666. These permission values need to be in octal, and are modified by your process's current "umask". In many systems the "O_EXCL" flag is available for opening files in exclusive mode. This is not locking: exclusiveness means here that if the file already exists, sysopen() fails. The "O_EXCL" wins "O_TRUNC". Sometimes you may want to truncate an already- existing file: "O_TRUNC". You should seldom if ever use 0644 as argument to "sysopen", because that takes away the user's option to have a more permissive umask. Better to omit it. See the perlfunc(c) entry on "umask" for more on this. Note that "sysopen" depends on the fdopen() C library function. On many UNIX systems, fdopen() is known to fail when file descriptors exceed a certain value, typically 255. If you need more file descriptors than that, consider rebuilding Perl to use the "sfio" library, or perhaps using the POSIX::open() function. See perlopentut for a kinder, gentler explanation of opening files. sysread FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET sysread FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH Attempts to read LENGTH bytes of data into vari- able SCALAR from the specified FILEHANDLE, using the system call read(d). It bypasses stdio, so mixing this with other kinds of reads, "print", "write", "seek", "tell", or "eof" can cause confu- sion because stdio usually buffers data. Returns the number of bytes actually read, 0 at end of file, or undef if there was an error. SCALAR will be grown or shrunk so that the last byte actually read is the last byte of the scalar after the read. An OFFSET may be specified to place the read data at some place in the string other than the begin- ning. A negative OFFSET specifies placement at that many bytes counting backwards from the end of the string. A positive OFFSET greater than the length of SCALAR results in the string being padded to the required size with "\0" bytes before the result of the read is appended. There is no syseof() function, which is ok, since eof() doesn't work very well on device files (like ttys) anyway. Use sysread() and check for a return value for 0 to decide whether you're done. sysseek FILEHANDLE,POSITION,WHENCE Sets FILEHANDLE's system position using the system call lseek(k). It bypasses stdio, so mixing this with reads (other than "sysread"), "print", "write", "seek", "tell", or "eof" may cause confu- sion. FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the filehandle. The values for WHENCE are 0 to set the new position to POSITION, 1 to set the it to the current position plus POSI- TION, and 2 to set it to EOF plus POSITION (typically negative). For WHENCE, you may also use the constants "SEEK_SET", "SEEK_CUR", and "SEEK_END" (start of the file, current position, end of the file) from the Fcntl module. Returns the new position, or the undefined value on failure. A position of zero is returned as the string "0 but true"; thus "sysseek" returns true on success and false on failure, yet you can still easily determine the new position. system LIST system PROGRAM LIST Does exactly the same thing as "exec LIST", except that a fork is done first, and the parent process waits for the child process to complete. Note that argument processing varies depending on the number of arguments. If there is more than one argument in LIST, or if LIST is an array with more than one value, starts the program given by the first element of the list with arguments given by the rest of the list. If there is only one scalar argument, the argument is checked for shell metacharacters, and if there are any, the entire argument is passed to the system's command shell for parsing (this is "/bin/sh -c" on Unix plat- forms, but varies on other platforms). If there are no shell metacharacters in the argument, it is split into words and passed directly to "execvp", which is more efficient. Beginning with v5.6.0, Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before any operation that may do a fork, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the "autoflush()" method of "IO::Handle" on any open handles. The return value is the exit status of the program as returned by the "wait" call. To get the actual exit value divide by 256. See also "exec". This is not what you want to use to capture the output from a command, for that you should use merely backticks or "qx//", as described in "`STRING`" in perlop. Return value of -1 indicates a failure to start the program (inspect $! for the reason). Like "exec", "system" allows you to lie to a pro- gram about its name if you use the "system PROGRAM LIST" syntax. Again, see "exec". Because "system" and backticks block "SIGINT" and "SIGQUIT", killing the program they're running doesn't actually interrupt your program. @args = ("command", "arg1", "arg2"); system(@args) == 0 or die "system @args failed: $?" You can check all the failure possibilities by inspecting $? like this: $exit_value = $? >> 8; $signal_num = $? & 127; $dumped_core = $? & 128; When the arguments get executed via the system shell, results and return codes will be subject to its quirks and capabilities. See "`STRING`" in perlop and "exec" for details. syswrite FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET syswrite FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH syswrite FILEHANDLE,SCALAR Attempts to write LENGTH bytes of data from vari- able SCALAR to the specified FILEHANDLE, using the system call write(e). If LENGTH is not specified, writes whole SCALAR. It bypasses stdio, so mixing this with reads (other than sysread()), "print", "write", "seek", "tell", or "eof" may cause confu- sion because stdio usually buffers data. Returns the number of bytes actually written, or "undef" if there was an error. If the LENGTH is greater than the available data in the SCALAR after the OFFSET, only as much data as is available will be written. An OFFSET may be specified to write the data from some part of the string other than the beginning. A negative OFFSET specifies writing that many bytes counting backwards from the end of the string. In the case the SCALAR is empty you can use OFFSET but only zero offset. tell FILEHANDLE tell Returns the current position for FILEHANDLE, or -1 on error. FILEHANDLE may be an expression whose value gives the name of the actual filehandle. If FILEHANDLE is omitted, assumes the file last read. The return value of tell() for the standard streams like the STDIN depends on the operating system: it may return -1 or something else. tell() on pipes, fifos, and sockets usually returns -1. There is no "systell" function. Use "sysseek(FH, 0, 1)" for that. telldir DIRHANDLE Returns the current position of the "readdir" rou- tines on DIRHANDLE. Value may be given to "seekdir" to access a particular location in a directory. Has the same caveats about possible directory compaction as the corresponding system library routine. tie VARIABLE,CLASSNAME,LIST This function binds a variable to a package class that will provide the implementation for the vari- able. VARIABLE is the name of the variable to be enchanted. CLASSNAME is the name of a class implementing objects of correct type. Any addi- tional arguments are passed to the "new" method of the class (meaning "TIESCALAR", "TIEHANDLE", "TIEARRAY", or "TIEHASH"). Typically these are arguments such as might be passed to the "dbm_open()" function of C. The object returned by the "new" method is also returned by the "tie" function, which would be useful if you want to access other methods in CLASSNAME. Note that functions such as "keys" and "values" may return huge lists when used on large objects, like DBM files. You may prefer to use the "each" function to iterate over such. Example: # print out history file offsets use NDBM_File; tie(%HIST, 'NDBM_File', '/usr/lib/news/history', 1, 0); while (($key,$val) = each %HIST) { print $key, ' = ', unpack('L',$val), "\n"; } untie(%HIST); A class implementing a hash should have the fol- lowing methods: TIEHASH classname, LIST FETCH this, key STORE this, key, value DELETE this, key CLEAR this EXISTS this, key FIRSTKEY this NEXTKEY this, lastkey DESTROY this UNTIE this A class implementing an ordinary array should have the following methods: TIEARRAY classname, LIST FETCH this, key STORE this, key, value FETCHSIZE this STORESIZE this, count CLEAR this PUSH this, LIST POP this SHIFT this UNSHIFT this, LIST SPLICE this, offset, length, LIST EXTEND this, count DESTROY this UNTIE this A class implementing a file handle should have the following methods: TIEHANDLE classname, LIST READ this, scalar, length, offset READLINE this GETC this WRITE this, scalar, length, offset PRINT this, LIST PRINTF this, format, LIST BINMODE this EOF this FILENO this SEEK this, position, whence TELL this OPEN this, mode, LIST CLOSE this DESTROY this UNTIE this A class implementing a scalar should have the fol- lowing methods: TIESCALAR classname, LIST FETCH this, STORE this, value DESTROY this UNTIE this Not all methods indicated above need be imple- mented. See perltie, Tie::Hash, Tie::Array, Tie::Scalar, and Tie::Handle. Unlike "dbmopen", the "tie" function will not use or require a module for you--you need to do that explicitly yourself. See DB_File or the Config module for interesting "tie" implementations. For further details see perltie, "tied VARIABLE". tied VARIABLE Returns a reference to the object underlying VARI- ABLE (the same value that was originally returned by the "tie" call that bound the variable to a package.) Returns the undefined value if VARIABLE isn't tied to a package. time Returns the number of non-leap seconds since what- ever time the system considers to be the epoch (that's 00:00:00, January 1, 1904 for MacOS, and 00:00:00 UTC, January 1, 1970 for most other sys- tems). Suitable for feeding to "gmtime" and "localtime". For measuring time in better granularity than one second, you may use either the Time::HiRes module from CPAN, or if you have gettimeofday(y), you may be able to use the "syscall" interface of Perl, see perlfaq8 for details. times Returns a four-element list giving the user and system times, in seconds, for this process and the children of this process. ($user,$system,$cuser,$csystem) = times; tr/// The transliteration operator. Same as "y///". See perlop. truncate FILEHANDLE,LENGTH truncate EXPR,LENGTH Truncates the file opened on FILEHANDLE, or named by EXPR, to the specified length. Produces a fatal error if truncate isn't implemented on your system. Returns true if successful, the undefined value otherwise. uc EXPR uc Returns an uppercased version of EXPR. This is the internal function implementing the "\U" escape in double-quoted strings. Respects current LC_CTYPE locale if "use locale" in force. See perllocale. Under Unicode ("use utf8") it uses the standard Unicode uppercase mappings. (It does not attempt to do titlecase mapping on initial letters. See "ucfirst" for that.) If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. ucfirst EXPR ucfirst Returns the value of EXPR with the first character in uppercase (titlecase in Unicode). This is the internal function implementing the "\u" escape in double-quoted strings. Respects current LC_CTYPE locale if "use locale" in force. See perllocale and utf8. If EXPR is omitted, uses $_. umask EXPR umask Sets the umask for the process to EXPR and returns the previous value. If EXPR is omitted, merely returns the current umask. The Unix permission "rwxr-x---" is represented as three sets of three bits, or three octal digits: 0750 (the leading 0 indicates octal and isn't one of the digits). The "umask" value is such a num- ber representing disabled permissions bits. The permission (or "mode") values you pass "mkdir" or "sysopen" are modified by your umask, so even if you tell "sysopen" to create a file with permis- sions 0777, if your umask is 0022 then the file will actually be created with permissions 0755. If your "umask" were 0027 (group can't write; oth- ers can't read, write, or execute), then passing "sysopen" 0666 would create a file with mode 0640 ("0666 &~ 027" is 0640). Here's some advice: supply a creation mode of 0666 for regular files (in "sysopen") and one of 0777 for directories (in "mkdir") and executable files. This gives users the freedom of choice: if they want protected files, they might choose process umasks of 022, 027, or even the particularly anti- social mask of 077. Programs should rarely if ever make policy decisions better left to the user. The exception to this is when writing files that should be kept private: mail files, web browser cookies, .rhosts files, and so on. If umask(k) is not implemented on your system and you are trying to restrict access for yourself (i.e., (EXPR & 0700) > 0), produces a fatal error at run time. If umask(k) is not implemented and you are not trying to restrict access for your- self, returns "undef". Remember that a umask is a number, usually given in octal; it is not a string of octal digits. See also "oct", if all you have is a string. undef EXPR undef Undefines the value of EXPR, which must be an lvalue. Use only on a scalar value, an array (using "@"), a hash (using "%"), a subroutine (using "&"), or a typeglob (using <*>). (Saying "undef $hash{$key}" will probably not do what you expect on most predefined variables or DBM list values, so don't do that; see delete.) Always returns the undefined value. You can omit the EXPR, in which case nothing is undefined, but you still get an undefined value that you could, for instance, return from a subroutine, assign to a variable or pass as a parameter. Examples: undef $foo; undef $bar{'blurfl'}; # Compare to: delete $bar{'blurfl'}; undef @ary; undef %hash; undef &mysub; undef *xyz; # destroys $xyz, @xyz, %xyz, &xyz, etc. return (wantarray ? (undef, $errmsg) : undef) if $they_blew_it; select undef, undef, undef, 0.25; ($a, $b, undef, $c) = &foo; # Ignore third value returned Note that this is a unary operator, not a list operator. unlink LIST unlink Deletes a list of files. Returns the number of files successfully deleted. $cnt = unlink 'a', 'b', 'c'; unlink @goners; unlink <*.bak>; Note: "unlink" will not delete directories unless you are superuser and the -U flag is supplied to Perl. Even if these conditions are met, be warned that unlinking a directory can inflict damage on your filesystem. Use "rmdir" instead. If LIST is omitted, uses $_. unpack TEMPLATE,EXPR "unpack" does the reverse of "pack": it takes a string and expands it out into a list of values. (In scalar context, it returns merely the first value produced.) The string is broken into chunks described by the TEMPLATE. Each chunk is converted separately to a value. Typically, either the string is a result of "pack", or the bytes of the string represent a C structure of some kind. The TEMPLATE has the same format as in the "pack" function. Here's a subroutine that does sub- string: sub substr { my($what,$where,$howmuch) = @_; unpack("x$where a$howmuch", $what); } and then there's sub ordinal { unpack("c",$_[0]); } # same as ord() In addition to fields allowed in pack(), you may prefix a field with a %<number> to indicate that you want a <number>-bit checksum of the items instead of the items themselves. Default is a 16-bit checksum. Checksum is calculated by sum- ming numeric values of expanded values (for string fields the sum of "ord($char)" is taken, for bit fields the sum of zeroes and ones). For example, the following computes the same num- ber as the System V sum program: $checksum = do { local $/; # slurp! unpack("%32C*",<>) % 65535; }; The following efficiently counts the number of set bits in a bit vector: $setbits = unpack("%32b*", $selectmask); The "p" and "P" formats should be used with care. Since Perl has no way of checking whether the value passed to "unpack()" corresponds to a valid memory location, passing a pointer value that's not known to be valid is likely to have disastrous consequences. If the repeat count of a field is larger than what the remainder of the input string allows, repeat count is decreased. If the input string is longer than one described by the TEMPLATE, the rest is ignored. See "pack" for more examples and notes. untie VARIABLE Breaks the binding between a variable and a pack- age. (See "tie".) unshift ARRAY,LIST Does the opposite of a "shift". Or the opposite of a "push", depending on how you look at it. Prepends list to the front of the array, and returns the new number of elements in the array. unshift(ARGV, '-e') unless $ARGV[0] =~ /^-/; Note the LIST is prepended whole, not one element at a time, so the prepended elements stay in the same order. Use "reverse" to do the reverse. use Module VERSION LIST use Module VERSION use Module LIST use Module use VERSION Imports some semantics into the current package from the named module, generally by aliasing cer- tain subroutine or variable names into your pack- age. It is exactly equivalent to BEGIN { require Module; import Module LIST; } except that Module must be a bareword. VERSION, which can be specified as a literal of the form v5.6.1, demands that the current version of Perl ($^V or $PERL_VERSION) be at least as recent as that version. (For compatibility with older versions of Perl, a numeric literal will also be interpreted as VERSION.) If the version of the running Perl interpreter is less than VER- SION, then an error message is printed and Perl exits immediately without attempting to parse the rest of the file. Compare with "require", which can do a similar check at run time. use v5.6.1; # compile time version check use 5.6.1; # ditto use 5.005_03; # float version allowed for compatibility This is often useful if you need to check the cur- rent Perl version before "use"ing library modules that have changed in incompatible ways from older versions of Perl. (We try not to do this more than we have to.) The "BEGIN" forces the "require" and "import" to happen at compile time. The "require" makes sure the module is loaded into memory if it hasn't been yet. The "import" is not a builtin--it's just an ordinary static method call into the "Module" package to tell the module to import the list of features back into the current package. The mod- ule can implement its "import" method any way it likes, though most modules just choose to derive their "import" method via inheritance from the "Exporter" class that is defined in the "Exporter" module. See Exporter. If no "import" method can be found then the call is skipped. If you do not want to call the package's "import" method (for instance, to stop your namespace from being altered), explicitly supply the empty list: use Module (); That is exactly equivalent to BEGIN { require Module } If the VERSION argument is present between Module and LIST, then the "use" will call the VERSION method in class Module with the given version as an argument. The default VERSION method, inher- ited from the UNIVERSAL class, croaks if the given version is larger than the value of the variable $Module::VERSION. Again, there is a distinction between omitting LIST ("import" called with no arguments) and an explicit empty LIST "()" ("import" not called). Note that there is no comma after VERSION! Because this is a wide-open interface, pragmas (compiler directives) are also implemented this way. Currently implemented pragmas are: use constant; use diagnostics; use integer; use sigtrap qw(SEGV BUS); use strict qw(subs vars refs); use subs qw(afunc blurfl); use warnings qw(w); Some of these pseudo-modules import semantics into the current block scope (like "strict" or "inte- ger", unlike ordinary modules, which import sym- bols into the current package (which are effective through the end of the file). There's a corresponding "no" command that unim- ports meanings imported by "use", i.e., it calls "unimport Module LIST" instead of "import". no integer; no strict 'refs'; no warnings; If no "unimport" method can be found the call fails with a fatal error. See perlmodlib for a list of standard modules and pragmas. See perlrun for the "-M" and "-m" com- mand-line options to perl that give "use" func- tionality from the command-line. utime LIST Changes the access and modification times on each file of a list of files. The first two elements of the list must be the NUMERICAL access and modi- fication times, in that order. Returns the number of files successfully changed. The inode change time of each file is set to the current time. This code has the same effect as the "touch" com- mand if the files already exist: #!/usr/bin/perl $now = time; utime $now, $now, @ARGV; values HASH Returns a list consisting of all the values of the named hash. (In a scalar context, returns the number of values.) The values are returned in an apparently random order. The actual random order is subject to change in future versions of perl, but it is guaranteed to be the same order as either the "keys" or "each" function would produce on the same (unmodified) hash. Note that the values are not copied, which means modifying them will modify the contents of the hash: for (values %hash) { s/foo/bar/g } # modifies %hash values for (@hash{keys %hash}) { s/foo/bar/g } # same As a side effect, calling values() resets the HASH's internal iterator. See also "keys", "each", and "sort". vec EXPR,OFFSET,BITS Treats the string in EXPR as a bit vector made up of elements of width BITS, and returns the value of the element specified by OFFSET as an unsigned integer. BITS therefore specifies the number of bits that are reserved for each element in the bit vector. This must be a power of two from 1 to 32 (or 64, if your platform supports that). If BITS is 8, "elements" coincide with bytes of the input string. If BITS is 16 or more, bytes of the input string are grouped into chunks of size BITS/8, and each group is converted to a number as with pack()/unpack() with big-endian formats "n"/"N" (and analogously for BITS==64). See "pack" for details. If bits is 4 or less, the string is broken into bytes, then the bits of each byte are broken into 8/BITS groups. Bits of a byte are numbered in a little-endian-ish way, as in 0x01, 0x02, 0x04, 0x08, 0x10, 0x20, 0x40, 0x80. For example, break- ing the single input byte "chr(r)" into two groups gives a list "(0x6, 0x3)"; breaking it into 4 groups gives "(0x2, 0x1, 0x3, 0x0)". "vec" may also be assigned to, in which case parentheses are needed to give the expression the correct precedence as in vec($image, $max_x * $x + $y, 8) = 3; If the selected element is outside the string, the value 0 is returned. If an element off the end of the string is written to, Perl will first extend the string with sufficiently many zero bytes. It is an error to try to write off the beginning of the string (i.e. negative OFFSET). The string should not contain any character with the value > 255 (which can only happen if you're using UTF8 encoding). If it does, it will be treated as something which is not UTF8 encoded. When the "vec" was assigned to, other parts of your program will also no longer consider the string to be UTF8 encoded. In other words, if you do have such characters in your string, vec() will operate on the actual byte string, and not the conceptual character string. Strings created with "vec" can also be manipulated with the logical operators "|", "&", "^", and "~". These operators will assume a bit vector operation is desired when both operands are strings. See "Bitwise String Operators" in perlop. The following code will build up an ASCII string saying 'PerlPerlPerl'. The comments show the string after each step. Note that this code works in the same way on big-endian or little-endian machines. my $foo = ''; vec($foo, 0, 32) = 0x5065726C; # 'Perl' # $foo eq "Perl" eq "\x50\x65\x72\x6C", 32 bits print vec($foo, 0, 8); # prints 80 == 0x50 == ord('P') vec($foo, 2, 16) = 0x5065; # 'PerlPe' vec($foo, 3, 16) = 0x726C; # 'PerlPerl' vec($foo, 8, 8) = 0x50; # 'PerlPerlP' vec($foo, 9, 8) = 0x65; # 'PerlPerlPe' vec($foo, 20, 4) = 2; # 'PerlPerlPe' . "\x02" vec($foo, 21, 4) = 7; # 'PerlPerlPer' # 'r' is "\x72" vec($foo, 45, 2) = 3; # 'PerlPerlPer' . "\x0c" vec($foo, 93, 1) = 1; # 'PerlPerlPer' . "\x2c" vec($foo, 94, 1) = 1; # 'PerlPerlPerl' # 'l' is "\x6c" To transform a bit vector into a string or list of 0's and 1's, use these: $bits = unpack("b*", $vector); @bits = split(//, unpack("b*", $vector)); If you know the exact length in bits, it can be used in place of the "*". Here is an example to illustrate how the bits actually fall in place: #!/usr/bin/perl -wl print <<'EOT'; 0 1 2 3 unpack("V",$_) 01234567890123456789012345678901 ------------------------------------------------------------------ EOT for $w (0..3) { $width = 2**$w; for ($shift=0; $shift < $width; ++$shift) { for ($off=0; $off < 32/$width; ++$off) { $str = pack("B*", "0"x32); $bits = (1<<$shift); vec($str, $off, $width) = $bits; $res = unpack("b*",$str); $val = unpack("V", $str); write; } } } format STDOUT = vec($_,@#,@#) = @<< == @######### @>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> $off, $width, $bits, $val, $res . __END__ Regardless of the machine architecture on which it is run, the above example should print the follow- ing table: 0 1 2 3 unpack("V",$_) 01234567890123456789012345678901 ------------------------------------------------------------------ vec($_, 0, 1) = 1 == 1 10000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 1) = 1 == 2 01000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 1) = 1 == 4 00100000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 1) = 1 == 8 00010000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 1) = 1 == 16 00001000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 5, 1) = 1 == 32 00000100000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 6, 1) = 1 == 64 00000010000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 7, 1) = 1 == 128 00000001000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 8, 1) = 1 == 256 00000000100000000000000000000000 vec($_, 9, 1) = 1 == 512 00000000010000000000000000000000 vec($_,10, 1) = 1 == 1024 00000000001000000000000000000000 vec($_,11, 1) = 1 == 2048 00000000000100000000000000000000 vec($_,12, 1) = 1 == 4096 00000000000010000000000000000000 vec($_,13, 1) = 1 == 8192 00000000000001000000000000000000 vec($_,14, 1) = 1 == 16384 00000000000000100000000000000000 vec($_,15, 1) = 1 == 32768 00000000000000010000000000000000 vec($_,16, 1) = 1 == 65536 00000000000000001000000000000000 vec($_,17, 1) = 1 == 131072 00000000000000000100000000000000 vec($_,18, 1) = 1 == 262144 00000000000000000010000000000000 vec($_,19, 1) = 1 == 524288 00000000000000000001000000000000 vec($_,20, 1) = 1 == 1048576 00000000000000000000100000000000 vec($_,21, 1) = 1 == 2097152 00000000000000000000010000000000 vec($_,22, 1) = 1 == 4194304 00000000000000000000001000000000 vec($_,23, 1) = 1 == 8388608 00000000000000000000000100000000 vec($_,24, 1) = 1 == 16777216 00000000000000000000000010000000 vec($_,25, 1) = 1 == 33554432 00000000000000000000000001000000 vec($_,26, 1) = 1 == 67108864 00000000000000000000000000100000 vec($_,27, 1) = 1 == 134217728 00000000000000000000000000010000 vec($_,28, 1) = 1 == 268435456 00000000000000000000000000001000 vec($_,29, 1) = 1 == 536870912 00000000000000000000000000000100 vec($_,30, 1) = 1 == 1073741824 00000000000000000000000000000010 vec($_,31, 1) = 1 == 2147483648 00000000000000000000000000000001 vec($_, 0, 2) = 1 == 1 10000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 2) = 1 == 4 00100000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 2) = 1 == 16 00001000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 2) = 1 == 64 00000010000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 2) = 1 == 256 00000000100000000000000000000000 vec($_, 5, 2) = 1 == 1024 00000000001000000000000000000000 vec($_, 6, 2) = 1 == 4096 00000000000010000000000000000000 vec($_, 7, 2) = 1 == 16384 00000000000000100000000000000000 vec($_, 8, 2) = 1 == 65536 00000000000000001000000000000000 vec($_, 9, 2) = 1 == 262144 00000000000000000010000000000000 vec($_,10, 2) = 1 == 1048576 00000000000000000000100000000000 vec($_,11, 2) = 1 == 4194304 00000000000000000000001000000000 vec($_,12, 2) = 1 == 16777216 00000000000000000000000010000000 vec($_,13, 2) = 1 == 67108864 00000000000000000000000000100000 vec($_,14, 2) = 1 == 268435456 00000000000000000000000000001000 vec($_,15, 2) = 1 == 1073741824 00000000000000000000000000000010 vec($_, 0, 2) = 2 == 2 01000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 2) = 2 == 8 00010000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 2) = 2 == 32 00000100000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 2) = 2 == 128 00000001000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 2) = 2 == 512 00000000010000000000000000000000 vec($_, 5, 2) = 2 == 2048 00000000000100000000000000000000 vec($_, 6, 2) = 2 == 8192 00000000000001000000000000000000 vec($_, 7, 2) = 2 == 32768 00000000000000010000000000000000 vec($_, 8, 2) = 2 == 131072 00000000000000000100000000000000 vec($_, 9, 2) = 2 == 524288 00000000000000000001000000000000 vec($_,10, 2) = 2 == 2097152 00000000000000000000010000000000 vec($_,11, 2) = 2 == 8388608 00000000000000000000000100000000 vec($_,12, 2) = 2 == 33554432 00000000000000000000000001000000 vec($_,13, 2) = 2 == 134217728 00000000000000000000000000010000 vec($_,14, 2) = 2 == 536870912 00000000000000000000000000000100 vec($_,15, 2) = 2 == 2147483648 00000000000000000000000000000001 vec($_, 0, 4) = 1 == 1 10000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 4) = 1 == 16 00001000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 4) = 1 == 256 00000000100000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 4) = 1 == 4096 00000000000010000000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 4) = 1 == 65536 00000000000000001000000000000000 vec($_, 5, 4) = 1 == 1048576 00000000000000000000100000000000 vec($_, 6, 4) = 1 == 16777216 00000000000000000000000010000000 vec($_, 7, 4) = 1 == 268435456 00000000000000000000000000001000 vec($_, 0, 4) = 2 == 2 01000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 4) = 2 == 32 00000100000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 4) = 2 == 512 00000000010000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 4) = 2 == 8192 00000000000001000000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 4) = 2 == 131072 00000000000000000100000000000000 vec($_, 5, 4) = 2 == 2097152 00000000000000000000010000000000 vec($_, 6, 4) = 2 == 33554432 00000000000000000000000001000000 vec($_, 7, 4) = 2 == 536870912 00000000000000000000000000000100 vec($_, 0, 4) = 4 == 4 00100000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 4) = 4 == 64 00000010000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 4) = 4 == 1024 00000000001000000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 4) = 4 == 16384 00000000000000100000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 4) = 4 == 262144 00000000000000000010000000000000 vec($_, 5, 4) = 4 == 4194304 00000000000000000000001000000000 vec($_, 6, 4) = 4 == 67108864 00000000000000000000000000100000 vec($_, 7, 4) = 4 == 1073741824 00000000000000000000000000000010 vec($_, 0, 4) = 8 == 8 00010000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 4) = 8 == 128 00000001000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 4) = 8 == 2048 00000000000100000000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 4) = 8 == 32768 00000000000000010000000000000000 vec($_, 4, 4) = 8 == 524288 00000000000000000001000000000000 vec($_, 5, 4) = 8 == 8388608 00000000000000000000000100000000 vec($_, 6, 4) = 8 == 134217728 00000000000000000000000000010000 vec($_, 7, 4) = 8 == 2147483648 00000000000000000000000000000001 vec($_, 0, 8) = 1 == 1 10000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 1 == 256 00000000100000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 1 == 65536 00000000000000001000000000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 1 == 16777216 00000000000000000000000010000000 vec($_, 0, 8) = 2 == 2 01000000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 2 == 512 00000000010000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 2 == 131072 00000000000000000100000000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 2 == 33554432 00000000000000000000000001000000 vec($_, 0, 8) = 4 == 4 00100000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 4 == 1024 00000000001000000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 4 == 262144 00000000000000000010000000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 4 == 67108864 00000000000000000000000000100000 vec($_, 0, 8) = 8 == 8 00010000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 8 == 2048 00000000000100000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 8 == 524288 00000000000000000001000000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 8 == 134217728 00000000000000000000000000010000 vec($_, 0, 8) = 16 == 16 00001000000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 16 == 4096 00000000000010000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 16 == 1048576 00000000000000000000100000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 16 == 268435456 00000000000000000000000000001000 vec($_, 0, 8) = 32 == 32 00000100000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 32 == 8192 00000000000001000000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 32 == 2097152 00000000000000000000010000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 32 == 536870912 00000000000000000000000000000100 vec($_, 0, 8) = 64 == 64 00000010000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 64 == 16384 00000000000000100000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 64 == 4194304 00000000000000000000001000000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 64 == 1073741824 00000000000000000000000000000010 vec($_, 0, 8) = 128 == 128 00000001000000000000000000000000 vec($_, 1, 8) = 128 == 32768 00000000000000010000000000000000 vec($_, 2, 8) = 128 == 8388608 00000000000000000000000100000000 vec($_, 3, 8) = 128 == 2147483648 00000000000000000000000000000001 wait Behaves like the wait(t) system call on your sys- tem: it waits for a child process to terminate and returns the pid of the deceased process, or "-1" if there are no child processes. The status is returned in $?. Note that a return value of "-1" could mean that child processes are being automat- ically reaped, as described in perlipc. waitpid PID,FLAGS Waits for a particular child process to terminate and returns the pid of the deceased process, or "-1" if there is no such child process. On some systems, a value of 0 indicates that there are processes still running. The status is returned in $?. If you say use POSIX ":sys_wait_h"; #... do { $kid = waitpid(-1,WNOHANG); } until $kid == -1; then you can do a non-blocking wait for all pend- ing zombie processes. Non-blocking wait is avail- able on machines supporting either the waitpid(d) or wait4(4) system calls. However, waiting for a particular pid with FLAGS of 0 is implemented everywhere. (Perl emulates the system call by remembering the status values of processes that have exited but have not been harvested by the Perl script yet.) Note that on some systems, a return value of "-1" could mean that child processes are being automat- ically reaped. See perlipc for details, and for other examples. wantarray Returns true if the context of the currently exe- cuting subroutine is looking for a list value. Returns false if the context is looking for a scalar. Returns the undefined value if the con- text is looking for no value (void context). return unless defined wantarray; # don't bother doing more my @a = complex_calculation(); return wantarray ? @a : "@a"; This function should have been named wantlist() instead. warn LIST Produces a message on STDERR just like "die", but doesn't exit or throw an exception. If LIST is empty and $@ already contains a value (typically from a previous eval) that value is used after appending "\t...caught" to $@. This is useful for staying almost, but not entirely simi- lar to "die". If $@ is empty then the string "Warning: Some- thing's wrong" is used. No message is printed if there is a $SIG{__WARN__} handler installed. It is the handler's responsi- bility to deal with the message as it sees fit (like, for instance, converting it into a "die"). Most handlers must therefore make arrangements to actually display the warnings that they are not prepared to deal with, by calling "warn" again in the handler. Note that this is quite safe and will not produce an endless loop, since "__WARN__" hooks are not called from inside one. You will find this behavior is slightly different from that of $SIG{__DIE__} handlers (which don't suppress the error text, but can instead call "die" again to change it). Using a "__WARN__" handler provides a powerful way to silence all warnings (even the so-called manda- tory ones). An example: # wipe out *all* compile-time warnings BEGIN { $SIG{'__WARN__'} = sub { warn $_[0] if $DOWARN } } my $foo = 10; my $foo = 20; # no warning about duplicate my $foo, # but hey, you asked for it! # no compile-time or run-time warnings before here $DOWARN = 1; # run-time warnings enabled after here warn "\$foo is alive and $foo!"; # does show up See perlvar for details on setting %SIG entries, and for more examples. See the Carp module for other kinds of warnings using its carp() and cluck() functions. write FILEHANDLE write EXPR write Writes a formatted record (possibly multi-line) to the specified FILEHANDLE, using the format associ- ated with that file. By default the format for a file is the one having the same name as the file- handle, but the format for the current output channel (see the "select" function) may be set explicitly by assigning the name of the format to the $~ variable. Top of form processing is handled automatically: if there is insufficient room on the current page for the formatted record, the page is advanced by writing a form feed, a special top-of-page format is used to format the new page header, and then the record is written. By default the top-of-page format is the name of the filehandle with "_TOP" appended, but it may be dynamically set to the format of your choice by assigning the name to the $^ variable while the filehandle is selected. The number of lines remaining on the current page is in variable "$-", which can be set to 0 to force a new page. If FILEHANDLE is unspecified, output goes to the current default output channel, which starts out as STDOUT but may be changed by the "select" oper- ator. If the FILEHANDLE is an EXPR, then the expression is evaluated and the resulting string is used to look up the name of the FILEHANDLE at run time. For more on formats, see perlform. Note that write is not the opposite of "read". Unfortunately. y/// The transliteration operator. Same as "tr///". See perlop. perl v5.6.1 2002-11-30 PERLFUNC(C)