NAME
    perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS

NOTE
    Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the mainte-
    nance release Perl 5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in Ami-
    gaOS. See "PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want to help fixing
    this problem.

SYNOPSIS
    One can read this document in the following formats:

     man perlamiga
     multiview perlamiga.guide

    to list some (not all may be available simultaneously), or it may be
    read as is: either as README.amiga, or pod/perlamiga.pod.

    A recent version of perl for the Amiga can be found at the Geek Gadgets
    section of the Aminet:

    http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/dev/gg/index.html

DESCRIPTION
    Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS

    Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library
    You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important
    part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest ver-
    sions of the following packages from the Aminet archives (
    http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/ ):

     ixemul-bin
     ixemul-env-bin
     pdksh-bin

    Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add
    other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).

    Version of Amiga OS
    You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is
    version 3.1.

    Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS

    Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same
    way as on any other platform, by

     perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3

    If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as
    opposed to your program), use

     perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

    Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute
    command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the
    s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX
    with

     foo arg1 arg2 arg3

    (Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not neces-
    sary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it easier
    to use your script under *nix.)

    Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS

    Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of
    deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:

    o   fork()

    o   some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and
    file dates

    o   inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file

    o   umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the
    file is finally close()d

INSTALLATION
    Change to the installation directory (most probably ADE:), and extract
    the binary distribution:

    lha -mraxe x perl-$VERSION-bin.lha

    or

    tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-bin.tgz

    (Of course you need lha or tar and gunzip for this.)

    For installation of the Unix emulation, read the appropriate docs.

Accessing documentation
    Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS

    If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl man-
    pages, use something like this:

     man perlfunc
     man less
     man ExtUtils.MakeMaker

    to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

     man perl

    Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in
    the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl
    library will not be found.

    Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for
    packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3
    above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.

    Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS

    If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs.  Cd to
    directory with .pod files, and do like this

     cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
     pod2html

    After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this
    directory, and go ahead with reading docs.

    Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".

    Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS

    Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl"
    mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alter-
    nately, prebuilt info pages.

    Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS

    Can be constructed using "pod2latex".

BUILDING PERL ON AMIGAOS
    Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.

    Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS

    You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from
    Aminet.

    Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS

    You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and
    extract it with:

  tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz

    or get the official source from CPAN:

  http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0

    Extract it like this

  tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz

    You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is
    normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file
    configure, but it causes no harm.)

    Making Perl on AmigaOS

    Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)

  sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg

    Now type

  make depend

    Now!

  make

    Testing Perl on AmigaOS

    Now run

  make test

    Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:

    io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t,
    lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t

    Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS

    Run

  make install

PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS
    As told above, Perl 5.6.1 was still good in AmigaOS, as was 5.7.2.
    After Perl 5.7.2 (change #11423, see the Changes file, and the file
    pod/perlhack.pod for how to get the individual changes) Perl dropped
    its internal support for vfork(), and that was very probably the step
    that broke AmigaOS (since the ixemul library has only vfork). The
    build finally fails when the ext/DynaLoader is being built, and PERL
    ends up as "0" in the produced Makefile, trying to run "0" does not
    quite work. Also, executing miniperl in backticks seems to generate
    nothing: very probably related to the (v)fork problems. Fixing the
    breakage requires someone quite familiar with the ixemul library, and
    how one is supposed to run external commands in AmigaOS without fork().

AUTHORS
    Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson,
    trg@privat.utfors.se

SEE ALSO
   perl(1).