|
perlamiga - Perl under Amiga OS
Perl 5.8.0 cannot be built in AmigaOS. You can use either the maintenance release Perl
5.6.1 or the development release Perl 5.7.2 in AmigaOS. See /"PERL 5.8.0 BROKEN IN AMIGAOS" if you want
to help fixing this problem.
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/dirs/dev_gg.html
|
|
- 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 versions 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.
Start your Perl program foo with arguments arg1 arg2 arg3 the same way
as on any other platform, by
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
(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not necessary, perl
would be enough, but having full path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.)
Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of deficiencies in the
UNIX-emulation, most notably:
- fork()
- some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates
- inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
- umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is finally
close()d
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.
If you have man installed on your system, and you installed perl manpages, use
something like this:
man perlfunc
man less
man ExtUtils.MakeMaker
|
|
to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with
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.
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.
Users of Emacs would appreciate it very much, especially with CPerl
mode loaded. You need to get latest pod2info from CPAN, or,
alternately, prebuilt info pages.
Can be constructed using pod2latex.
Here we discuss how to build Perl under AmigaOS.
You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet.
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.)
Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)
sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg
|
|
Now type
Now!
Now run
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
Run
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().
Norbert Pueschel, pueschel@imsdd.meb.uni-bonn.de Jan-Erik Karlsson, trg@privat.utfors.se
perl(1).
|
