perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl

       Direct questions, comments, and the unlikely bug report (ahem) direct comments toward:

       Luther Huffman, lutherh@stratcom.com, Strategic Computer Solutions, Inc.

perl v5.40.1                                       2025-07-25                                       PERLPLAN9(1)

       "As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world . . ." - Carl Sagan

       WELCOME to Plan 9 Perl, brave soul!

          This is a preliminary alpha version of Plan 9 Perl. Still to be
       implemented are MakeMaker and DynaLoader. Many perl commands are
       missing or currently behave in an inscrutable manner. These gaps will,
       with perseverance and a modicum of luck, be remedied in the near
       future.To install this software:

       1. Create the source directories and libraries for perl by running the plan9/setup.rc command (i.e.,
       located in the plan9 subdirectory).  Note: the setup routine assumes that you haven't dearchived these
       files into /sys/src/cmd/perl. After running setup.rc you may delete the copy of the source you originally
       detarred, as source code has now been installed in /sys/src/cmd/perl. If you plan on installing perl
       binaries for all architectures, run "setup.rc -a".

       2. After making sure that you have adequate privileges to build system software, from
       /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

               mk install

       If you wish to install perl versions for all architectures (68020, mips, sparc and 386) run:

               mk installall

       3. Wait. The build process will take a *long* time because perl bootstraps itself. A 75MHz Pentium, 16MB
       RAM machine takes roughly 30 minutes to build the distribution from scratch.

   InstallingPerlDocumentationonPlan9
       This perl distribution comes with a tremendous amount of documentation. To add these to the built-in
       manuals that come with Plan 9, from /sys/src/cmd/perl/5.00301 (adjust version appropriately) run:

               mk man

       To begin your reading, start with:

               man perl

       This is a good introduction and will direct you towards other man pages that may interest you.

       (Note: "mk man" may produce some extraneous noise. Fear not.)

       These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9 Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a
       replacement for the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both copious and excellent). If you have
       any questions to which you can't find answers in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at
       lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer them.

   InvokingPerl
       Perl is invoked from the command line as described in perl. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first
       line such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a shebang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS
       shell where to find the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this statement should be "#!/bin/perl" if you
       wish to be able to directly invoke the script by its name.
            Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce
       Acme-friendly error messages of the form "filename:18".

       Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are self-configuring and are able to correctly
       create their own shebang path from config information located in Plan 9 Perl. These you won't need to be
       worried about.

   What'sinPlan9Perl
       Although Plan 9 Perl currently only  provides static loading, it is built with a number of useful
       extensions.  These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect to see others (and DynaLoading!)
       in the future.

   What'snotinPlan9Perl
       As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-
       priority items.

   Perl5FunctionsnotcurrentlysupportedinPlan9Perl
       Some, such as "chown" and "umask" aren't provided because the concept does not exist within Plan 9.
       Others, such as some of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written yet. Many in the latter
       category may be supported in the future.

       The functions not currently implemented include:

           chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
           setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
           getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
           sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
           endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

       There may be several other functions that have undefined behavior so this list shouldn't be considered
       complete.

   SignalsinPlan9Perl
       For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal
       emulation provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal stacking isn't supported. The signals
       provided are:

           SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
           SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
           SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
           SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

       perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl

       This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.