fw_LWperl5 is the Freeware version of Larry Wall's Perl version 5, patchlevel 002. Perl is an interpreted language optimized for scanning arbitrary text files, extracting information from those text files, and printing reports based on that information. It's also a good language for many system management tasks. The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). It combines (in the author's opinion, anyway) some of the best features of C, sed, awk, and sh, so people familiar with those languages should have little difficulty with it. Expression syntax corresponds quite closely to C expression syntax.
In addition to the standard Perl library modules, this package includes the following modules:
All of the subsystems for this product can be installed using IRIX. You do not need to use the miniroot. Refer to the Software Installation Administrator's Guide for complete installation instructions.
The Perl library installs into /usr/freeware/lib/perl5. New to Perl5.002 is another directory intended for Perl release independent library files and modules. The directory is /usr/freeware/lib/perl5/site_perl. Note that this directory is created during the install,and is in the compiled @INC include path, but nothing is installed in that directory.
Some of the Perl files are created during the installation process. These include the conditional symlink at /usr/bin/perl and the Perl-ified includes (created in the directory /usr/freeware/lib/perl5/irix by the command h2ph). These are created by a script that runs at the end of the install. As you change your software configuration, you may wish to re-run this command (you need to run it from a root shell):
/usr/freeware/lib/perl5/make.libs
Note: a quote from the h2ph program documentation BUGS section:
It doesn't handle all C constructs, but it does attempt to isolate definitions inside evals so that you can get at the definitions that it can translate.
It's only intended as a rough tool. You may need to dicker with the files produced.What this means is that you will probably have to repair some of the *.ph files that you use. IRIX .h files are getting complex enough that a real C parser is really needed, rather than the partial parser that h2ph is. The h2ph supplied with this version of Perl has already been patched to fix a lot of the errors, but since using the Perl-ified include (.ph) files is deprecated (as a Perl4 compatibility mode) in favor of using Modules (the .pm files), the fixes are mostly cosmetic.
None.
This software is compatible with IRIX 6.2.
Perl version 5 is a whole new language intended to be as compatible as possible with the published Perl version 4 language definition. Perl-5 is by no means bug-compatible with Perl-4 (or earlier releases). The one documented difference in the published interface is that Perl-5 interpolates arrays into double-quoted strings. To get the Perl-4 behaviour (for example, printing email addresses), replace occurences of "@" with "\@". Note that the Perl-4 parser, in line with the intent of the language, did not prohibit many operations that made sense syntactically, but were not part of the language spec. Some Perl-4 scripts rely, in effect, on Perl-4 bugs. These scripts will not run under Perl-5 until they are corrected. For more details, see the perltrap man page. Perl-5's parser generates much better errors and warnings about such incorrect syntax. See:
perl -w script
Perl-4 can be installed from the IRIX EOE CDROM as eoe.sw.gifts_perl and eoe.man.gifts_perl. The only conflict between the two installations is the canonical interpreter location /usr/bin/perl, which Perl-4 wins if both are installed. fw_LWperl5 installs additional links to help differentiate the two versions if both are installed: /usr/bin/perl4, /usr/bin/perl5, and man page links so that man perl4 and man perl5 work. If eoe.sw.gifts_perl is not installed, those are dangling links.
Perl is supported (and partially developed) on the Internet newsgroup comp.lang.perl.misc. Announcements (such as new releases, patches and bug fixes, and new modules) are made to the Internet newsgroup comp.lang.perl.announce.
In addition, a great deal of perl information is available on the Internet and via WWW. A good starting point is the CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network).
Perl was written by Larry Wall <lwall@netlabs.com> with the help of many other people, the most public of which are Tom Christiansen <tchrist@mox.perl.com> and Randal Schwartz <merlyn@stonehenge.com>.