perlutil

PERLUTIL(1)            Perl Programmers Reference Guide            PERLUTIL(1)

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.

LIST OF UTILITIES
   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 <name>" 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 manpage, 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
          As well as these two, there is another converter: pod2html will
          produce HTML pages from POD.

       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 "SYNOPSIS" ..." 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.

   Converters
       To help you convert legacy programs to more modern Perl, the pl2pm
       utility will help you convert old-style Perl 4 libraries to new-style
       Perl5 modules.

   Administration
       libnetcfg
          To display and change the libnet configuration run the libnetcfg
          command.

       perlivp
          The perlivp program is set up at Perl source code build time to test
          the Perl version it was built under.  It can be used after running
          "make install" (or your platform's equivalent procedure) to verify
          that perl and its libraries have been installed correctly.

   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.

       perlthanks
          This program provides an easy way to send a thank-you message back
          to the authors and maintainers of perl. It's just perlbug installed
          under another name.

       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 once.

       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.

       enc2xs
          enc2xs builds a Perl extension for use by Encode from either Unicode
          Character Mapping files (.ucm) or Tcl Encoding Files (.enc).
          Besides being used internally during the build process of the Encode
          module, you can use enc2xs to add your own encoding to perl.  No
          knowledge of XS is necessary.

       xsubpp
          xsubpp is a compiler to convert Perl XS code into C code.  It is
          typically run by the makefiles created by ExtUtils::MakeMaker.

          xsubpp will compile XS code into C code by embedding the constructs
          necessary to let C functions manipulate Perl values and creates the
          glue necessary to let Perl access those functions.

       prove
          prove is a command-line interface to the test-running functionality
          of Test::Harness.  It's an alternative to "make test".

       corelist
          A command-line front-end to "Module::CoreList", to query what
          modules were shipped with given versions of perl.

   General tools
       A few general-purpose tools are shipped with perl, mostly because they
       came along modules included in the perl distribution.

       piconv
          piconv is a Perl version of iconv, a character encoding converter
          widely available for various Unixen today.  This script was
          primarily a technology demonstrator for Perl v5.8.0, but you can use
          piconv in the place of iconv for virtually any case.

       ptar
          ptar is a tar-like program, written in pure Perl.

       ptardiff
          ptardiff is a small utility that produces a diff between an
          extracted archive and an unextracted one. (Note that this utility
          requires the "Text::Diff" module to function properly; this module
          isn't distributed with perl, but is available from the CPAN.)

       ptargrep
          ptargrep is a utility to apply pattern matching to the contents of
          files in a tar archive.

       shasum
          This utility, that comes with the "Digest::SHA" module, is used to
          print or verify SHA checksums.

       zipdetails
          zipdetails displays information about the internal record structure
          of the zip file.  It is not concerned with displaying any details of
          the compressed data stored in the zip file.

   Installation
       These utilities help manage extra Perl modules that don't come with the
       perl distribution.

       cpan
          cpan is a command-line interface to CPAN.pm.  It allows you to
          install modules or distributions from CPAN, or just get information
          about them, and a lot more.  It is similar to the command line mode
          of the CPAN module,

              perl -MCPAN -e shell

       instmodsh
          A little interface to ExtUtils::Installed to examine installed
          modules, validate your packlists and even create a tarball from an
          installed module.

SEE ALSO
       perldoc, pod2man, perlpod, pod2html, pod2usage, podselect, podchecker,
       splain, perldiag, "roffitall|roffitall", File::Find, pl2pm, perlbug,
       h2ph, h2xs, enc2xs, xsubpp, cpan, instmodsh, piconv, prove, corelist,
       ptar, ptardiff, shasum, zipdetails

perl v5.30.0                      2023-11-23                       PERLUTIL(1)