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PERLUTIL
!!!PERLUTIL
NAME
DESCRIPTION
----
!!NAME


perlutil - utilities packaged with the Perl distribution
!!DESCRIPTION


Along with the Perl interpreter itself, the Perl
distribution installs a range of utilities on your system.
There are also several utilities which are used by the Perl
distribution itself as part of the install process. This
document exists to list all of these utilities, explain what
they are for and provide pointers to each module's
documentation, if appropriate.


__DOCUMENTATION__


perldoc


The main interface to Perl's documentation is
perldoc, although if you're reading this, it's more
than likely that you've already found it. ''perldoc''
will extract and format the documentation from any file in
the current directory, any Perl module installed on the
system, or any of the standard documentation pages, such as
this one. Use perldoc  to get
information on any of the utilities described in this
document.


pod2man and pod2text


If it's run from a terminal, ''perldoc'' will usually
call ''pod2man'' to translate POD (Plain
Old Documentation - see perlpod for an explanation) into a
man page, and then run ''man'' to display it; if
''man'' isn't available, ''pod2text'' will be used
instead and the output piped through your favourite
pager.


pod2html and pod2latex


As well as these two, there are two other converters:
''pod2html'' will produce HTML pages from
POD , and ''pod2latex'', which produces
LaTeX files.


pod2usage


If you just want to know how to use the utilities described
here, ''pod2usage'' will just extract the ``
USAGE '' section; some of the utilities will
automatically call ''pod2usage'' on themselves when you
call them with -help.


podselect


''pod2usage'' is a special case of ''podselect'', a
utility to extract named sections from documents written in
POD . For instance, while utilities have ``
USAGE '' sections, Perl modules usually have
`` SYNOPSIS '' sections: podselect -s
 will extract this section for
a given file.


podchecker


If you're writing your own documentation in
POD , the ''podchecker'' utility will look
for errors in your markup.


splain


''splain'' is an interface to perldiag - paste in your
error message to it, and it'll explain it for
you.


roffitall


The roffitall utility is not installed on your
system but lives in the ''pod/'' directory of your Perl
source kit; it converts all the documentation from the
distribution to ''*roff'' format, and produces a typeset
PostScript or text file of the whole lot.


__CONVERTORS__


To help you convert legacy programs to Perl, we've included
three conversion filters:


a2p


''a2p'' converts ''awk'' scripts to Perl programs; for
example, a2p -F: on the simple ''awk'' script
{print $2} will produce a Perl program based around
this code:


    while (


s2p


Similarly, ''s2p'' converts ''sed'' scripts to Perl
programs. ''s2p'' run on s/foo/bar will produce
a Perl program based around this:


    while (


find2perl


Finally, ''find2perl'' translates find commands
to Perl equivalents which use the File::Find module. As an
example, find2perl . -user root -perm 4000 -print
produces the following callback subroutine for
File::Find:


    sub wanted {
my ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid);
(($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid) = lstat($_))


As well as these filters for converting other languages, the
pl2pm utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4
libraries to new-style Perl5 modules.


__Development__


There are a set of utilities which help you in developing
Perl programs, and in particular, extending Perl with
C.


perlbug


''perlbug'' is the recommended way to report bugs in the
perl interpreter itself or any of the standard library
modules back to the developers; please read through the
documentation for ''perlbug'' thoroughly before using it
to submit a bug report.


h2ph


Back before Perl had the XS system for
connecting with C libraries, programmers used to get library
constants by reading through the C header files. You may
still see require 'syscall.ph' or similar around -
the ''.ph'' file should be created by running ''h2ph''
on the corresponding ''.h'' file. See the ''h2ph''
documentation for more on how to convert a whole bunch of
header files at ones.


c2ph and pstruct


''c2ph'' and ''pstruct'', which are actually the same
program but behave differently depending on how they are
called, provide another way of getting at C with Perl -
they'll convert C structures and union declarations to Perl
code. This is deprecated in favour of ''h2xs'' these
days.


h2xs


''h2xs'' converts C header files into XS
modules, and will try and write as much glue between C
libraries and Perl modules as it can. It's also very useful
for creating skeletons of pure Perl modules.


dprofpp


Perl comes with a profiler, the ''Devel::Dprof'' module.
The ''dprofpp'' utility analyzes the output of this
profiler and tells you which subroutines are taking up the
most run time. See Devel::Dprof for more
information.


perlcc


''perlcc'' is the interface to the experimental Perl
compiler suite.


__SEE ALSO__


perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect,
podchecker, splain, perldiag, roffitall, a2p, s2p,
find2perl, File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug, h2ph, c2ph, h2xs,
dprofpp, Devel::Dprof, perlcc
----
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