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Platform specific changes

Supported platforms

  • The Mach CThreads (NEXTSTEP, OPENSTEP) are now supported by the Thread extension.
  • GNU/Hurd is now supported.
  • Rhapsody/Darwin is now supported.
  • EPOC is now supported (on Psion 5).
  • The cygwin port (formerly cygwin32) has been greatly improved.

DOS

  • Perl now works with djgpp 2.02 (and 2.03 alpha).
  • Environment variable names are not converted to uppercase any more.
  • Incorrect exit codes from backticks have been fixed.
  • This port continues to use its own builtin globbing (not File::Glob).

OS390 (OpenEdition MVS)

Support for this EBCDIC platform has not been renewed in this release. There are difficulties in reconciling Perl's standardization on UTF-8 as its internal representation for characters with the EBCDIC character set, because the two are incompatible.

It is unclear whether future versions will renew support for this platform, but the possibility exists.

VMS

Numerous revisions and extensions to configuration, build, testing, and installation process to accommodate core changes and VMS-specific options.

Expand %ENV-handling code to allow runtime mapping to logical names, CLI symbols, and CRTL environ array.

Extension of subprocess invocation code to accept filespecs as command "verbs".

Add to Perl command line processing the ability to use default file types and to recognize Unix-style 2>&1.

Expansion of File::Spec::VMS routines, and integration into ExtUtils::MM_VMS.

Extension of ExtUtils::MM_VMS to handle complex extensions more flexibly.

Barewords at start of Unix-syntax paths may be treated as text rather than only as logical names.

Optional secure translation of several logical names used internally by Perl.

Miscellaneous bugfixing and porting of new core code to VMS.

Thanks are gladly extended to the many people who have contributed VMS patches, testing, and ideas.

Win32

Perl can now emulate fork() internally, using multiple interpreters running in different concurrent threads. This support must be enabled at build time. See perlfork for detailed information.

When given a pathname that consists only of a drivename, such as A:, opendir() and stat() now use the current working directory for the drive rather than the drive root.

The builtin XSUB functions in the Win32:: namespace are documented. See Win32.

$^X now contains the full path name of the running executable.

A Win32::GetLongPathName() function is provided to complement Win32::GetFullPathName() and Win32::GetShortPathName(). See Win32.

POSIX::uname() is supported.

system(1,...) now returns true process IDs rather than process handles. kill() accepts any real process id, rather than strictly return values from system(1,...).

For better compatibility with Unix, kill(0, $pid) can now be used to test whether a process exists.

The Shell module is supported.

Better support for building Perl under command.com in Windows 95 has been added.

Scripts are read in binary mode by default to allow ByteLoader (and the filter mechanism in general) to work properly. For compatibility, the DATA filehandle will be set to text mode if a carriage return is detected at the end of the line containing the __END__ or __DATA__ token; if not, the DATA filehandle will be left open in binary mode. Earlier versions always opened the DATA filehandle in text mode.

The glob() operator is implemented via the File::Glob extension, which supports glob syntax of the C shell. This increases the flexibility of the glob() operator, but there may be compatibility issues for programs that relied on the older globbing syntax. If you want to preserve compatibility with the older syntax, you might want to run perl with -MFile::DosGlob. For details and compatibility information, see File::Glob.

 

  

 

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