CONTENTS

• NAME
• DESCRIPTION
• LIST OF UTILITIES
  • Documentation
  • Converters
  • Administration
  • Development
  • General tools
  • Installation
• SEE ALSO

#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 and pod2latex

As well as these two, there are two other converters: pod2html will produce HTML pages from POD, and pod2latex, which produces LaTeX files.

#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 Perl, we've included three conversion filters:

#a2p

a2p converts awk scripts to Perl programs; for example, a2p -F: on the simple awk script {print $2} will produce a Perl program based around this code:

while (<>) {
    ($Fld1,$Fld2) = split(/[:\n]/, $_, -1);
    print $Fld2;
}

#