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Text File | 1995-05-19 | 21.0 KB | 519 lines

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Perl for NT (based on Perl 4.036) Release notes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7/8/93 Second release ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT CHANGE FROM THE LAST RELEASE! All of the pre-defined variables for registry access (such as $HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) have been removed from the interpreter and moved into the file registry.pl. This file can be accessed by putting a 'require' statment in your perl script, i.e.: require "registry.pl"; This was due to the large number of constants required for accessing the registry. Rather than clutter the internals of the interpreter it was thought easier to move the values into a file and require it when needed. This release adds the pre-defined subroutine &Spawn, that creates an independent process. &Spawn allows creation of processes for bi-directional communication using pipes. It's usage is: &Spawn ("cmd /c dir/w", $pid, readHandle, writeHandle, errHandle) || die "cannot spawn cmd.exe: $!\n"; The read, write, and error handles are optional. If not specified the new process inherits the creating processes input, output, and error file handles. The perl scripts regupdat.cmd and uninstal.cmd were added to the distribution to allow quick modification and removal of perl's keys in the NT registry. This is for folks that like to move the installed version around. They are not normally needed, since the registry keys are automatically updated by the setup installation procedure. More testing has been done on this release. All the registry access routines that access keys and values have been tested. The routines that modify the structure of the registry (&RegLoadKey, &RegReplaceKey, &RegRestoreKey, &RegSaveKey, and &RegUnloadKey) have not been tested, since I have yet to discover the NT privledge that a process needs to modify the registry structure :-(. Some bugs were discovered in the initial release (gasp!) and these have been fixed. Most were in specifying the size of data items written to the registry. Error reporting still has problems because there are two sets of error numbers, one for the C runtime library (CRT) and the other for Win32 functions. The numbers overlap, so there is no easy way to determine whether the error came from the CRT or from a Win32 function. Until a better mechanism is developed, the CRT errors are reported for numbers that overlap. Some mysterious problem with cmd.exe and command file execution has required a change in the way perl scripts are executed from command files. The perl switch '-S' should be removed from the command line where perl is run. This is a change for build 438 of NT. If you are running on an earlier version, then the -S switch will still be required. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5/20/93 Initial release ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the initial release of Perl for NT. In addition to winsock access, this release adds user-defined routines to access the NT Registry database. For information on how to use the registry access routines, see the new file registry.txt. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5/12/93 Second Beta Release ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This release of Perl for NT has support for the Winsock sockets interface. Minimal testing has been done, but this version will connect to an ftp server and the echo service on my system. See the sample program sock.cmd in the eg directory. Supported functions are: accept bind connect getpeername getsockname getsockopt listen recv send setsockopt shutdown socket gethostbyname getservbyname getprotobyname Remember that Winsock only supported Internet domain sockets. For more information read the help file "Windows Sockets Help" that is delivered with the Win32 Software Development Kit. Also, a problem was seen during installation. Some sites haven't delivered PROGTOOLS and so don't have the unzip.exe executable. To fix this, the delivery site now has a copy of unzip.exe. When delivering perl, please copy all of the files from the delivery system (ajax.b11.ingr.com) to your system, then run the installation script. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5/6/93 First Beta Release ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the first Beta release of the Perl port to Windows NT. Most of the testing for this release (97.62% ;-) has been done on the March Beta release of NT. The testing that was done on the December release turned up some problems in the C runtime library that have not been solved, so perl on the December release in mostly an unknown quantity. There are not many external differences between this release and the last Alpha release; mostly just additional tests added to the test suite. Internally, changes have been made that should speed up script processing. Process creation for backticks, systems, and opens to/from piped commands have been optimized so that cmd.exe is not started unless the command string contains i/o redirection or pipes. For information about differences between the Unix release of Perl and this release, read the sections of this file starting with "General Information". For information on what features of perl are supported, have been tested, etc., see the file status.txt. For example perl scripts that run under NT, including a script that will make an existing perl script runnable under NT, see the files in the eg directory. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4/28/93 Second Alpha release ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- This release fixes a bug in the initial release and updates the testing status of features listed in status.txt. It also renames some of the scripts in the lib directory to fit the 8.3 file name restrictions. The following library scripts were renamed: lib\timelocal.pl -> lib\timelocl.pl lib\shellwords.pl -> lib\shwords.pl lib\newgetopt.pl -> lib\ngetopt.pl lib\importenv.pl -> lib\impenv.pl lib\finddepth.pl -> lib\finddep.pl lib\exceptions.pl -> lib\except.pl NOTE: This release has only been tested on the March Beta release of NT. I'll be testing perl on the December release in the next few days and will determine if it's feasible to make the changes needed to run on December. It's possible that there will be two releases, one for December and one for March, but that decision will have to be made based on the amount of work required to create and maintain a December version. A list of the features in status.txt that have changed from the first release: Command line options: -a: changed from Untested to Tested -i: changed from Untested to Tested -S: changed from Untested to Tested -U: changed from Untested to NYI File test operators -c: changed from Untested to N/A -b: changed from Untested to N/A -o: changed from Untested to Tested -p: changed from Untested to NYI -f: changed from Untested to Tested -d: changed from Untested to Tested -e: changed from Untested to Tested -z: changed from Untested to Tested -s: changed from Untested to Tested -t: changed from Untested to Tested -w: changed from Untested to Tested -x: changed from Untested to Tested -R: changed from Untested to Tested -W: changed from Untested to Tested -X: changed from Untested to Tested -O: changed from Untested to Tested -T: changed from Untested to Tested -B: changed from Untested to Tested -M: changed from Untested to Tested -A: changed from Untested to Tested -C: changed from Untested to Tested Literals Here-Is:: changed from Untested to Tested Search and Replace Functions ?<pattern>?: changed from Untested to Tested /<pattern>/: changed from Untested to Tested System Interaction getlogin: changed from Untested to NYI Arithmetic functions atan2: changed from Untested to Tested sin: changed from Untested to Tested sqrt: changed from Untested to Tested log: changed from Untested to Tested int: changed from Untested to Tested cos: changed from Untested to Tested exp: changed from Untested to Tested File operations truncate: changed from NYI to Tested Input / Output binmode: changed from Untested to Tested Miscellaneous scalar: changed from Untested to Tested wantarray: changed from Untested to Tested Special Arrays @INC: changed from Untested to Tested The Perl Debugger L: changed from Untested to Tested X: changed from Untested to Tested S: changed from Untested to Tested D: changed from Untested to Tested d: changed from Untested to Tested w: changed from Untested to Tested r: changed from Untested to Tested Environment Variables PERLLIB: changed from Untested to Tested Perl Library Routines abbrev.pl: changed from Untested to Tested ctime.pl: changed from Untested to Tested find.pl: changed from NYI to Tested Problems that were fixed: - Fixed default search path for perl library routines to contain the drive letter as well as the path. This currently is c:\win32app\ingr\perl\lib. Later releases are planned to have the ability to be installed on any drive. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4/22/93 First Alpha Release --------------------------------------------------------------------------- These are the release notes for the Alpha release of Perl for NT. The port was done by starting with the DOS port, then discarding most of that and reimplementing the functions required. For a complete list of the perl features that we plan to support, see the file status.txt. This file also indicates the testing status of each feature. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- General Information --------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are some changes in how perl scripts are written and invoked on NT (versus how they are invoked on Unix). However, these changes should not be too radical to make perl unusable for NT. In general be very careful of things depending on wild card expansion and specifics of command line arguments (i.e. how /bin/sh, or any shell for that matter, treats quotes). The NT command interpreter (cmd.exe) does not treat single quotes in a similar manner as unix shells, in fact it treats single quotes as just another character. Getting your perl script to execute without explicitly invoking perl takes some strange contortions. Trying to emulate the Unix sharp-bang facility (#!) was interesting. Here is an incantation that we've found to work: 1. Give your perl script a ".cmd" extension. This tells the command interpreter (cmd.exe) that it's ok to execute. (No, really!). 2. Put the following text at the start of your file: @rem = ' @echo off perl %0.cmd %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 goto endofperl @rem '; 3. Now type in your perl script. 4. Put the following lines at the end of your perl script __END__ :endofperl The five lines of #2 are both legal perl and legal commands for the command interpreter, cmd.exe. The first time the file is executed (by cmd.exe) the command interpreter will interpret the "@rem -'" as a comment and the "@echo off" as a command to turn off echoing commands. It will then execute perl with the script name as the first argument and the parameters to the command file as arguments to perl. When perl sees the file the first five lines are interpreted as an assignment to the array @rem. When perl finished executing the perl statements it will terminate and the goto statememt will be executed by the command interpreter. The __END__ line of #4 is magic to perl and tells the interpreter that there is no more legal perl source in the file. The :endofperl is th target of the command interpreter's goto statement from #2. Make sure that when you run the script, you do so without the extension, since the %0 parameter to the command interpreter is exactly what you typed. It's ugly, but it works. Note that there is a now a perl script in the eg directory named ntcvt.cmd. It will perform the above steps on an existing perl script. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Globbing (wildcard expansion) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Many scripts depend on a unix shell (sh, ksh, csh, etc) to do wildcard expansion. This construct is often used in perl scripts: $srcfiles = `echo *.c src/*.c inc/*.h`; This will not work under NT, because the echo command for the command interpreter (cmd.exe) does not expand wildcards. The prefered (at least for the moment ;-) mechanism is globbing (anything between angle brackets that's not a filehandle is considered to be a pattern to be globbed). The above example could be translated like this: $srcfiles = join (" ", <*.c src/*.c inc/*.h>); The glob pattern returns either an array of filenames or the next file of the list depending on context (page 78 of Programming Perl). In the above example it returns an array of filenames. If used in a while loop test it would return a filename for each iteration of the loop. Note that you can use either forward or back slashes for directory separators, but if you use backslashes, then you must use two of them: $srcfiles = join (" ", <*.c src\\*.c inc\\*.h>); Remember that whatever directory separator that you use will be in the strings returned. Another method is to use readdir with grep: opendir(D, ".") || die "Can't open \".\": $!\n"; @files = grep (/^.*\.c$/, readdir(D)); closedir(D); $srcfiles = join (" ", @files); Hopefully I'll be able to implement globing in the interpreter later on, but for now it runs a program named perlglob through a popen'ed pipe. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Processes --------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are some significant differences in how NT treats processes versus how Unix treats processes. Process creation is the first big difference. Unix uses the fork(2) system call to create an new process and the exec(2) system call to load a new executable into the new processes address space. NT merges these steps into one operation with the CreateProcess system service. There is no equivalent to the fork operation under NT. For this reason the perl call 'fork' was not implemented. With the addition of the &Spawn subroutine, there are now four ways to create a process on NT: use &Spawn, backticks, the system command, or with the open command. Another difference is process hierarchy and process groups. NT does not maintain any relationship between a process and the process that created it. This throws all of the parent/child relationships used in Unix out the window. For this reason the perl functions regarding parent process id and process groups were not implemented. There is simply no way to determine the creating process id and there is no tree of processes maintained to allow process groups. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Users and Groups --------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a real rat's nest. Both NT and Unix have the concept of user id's; the problem is with Unix's notion of real and effective uids. NT doesn't have this concept, so separate file test operators for real versus effective uid ownership don't make sense. Groups also pose a problem in this port. At any point in time, a Unix process is associated with one group; this is it's group id. With NT, a user (hence a user id) may be a member of several groups simultaneously. NT processes are associated with a user id, so they also may be members of several groups. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Internationalization --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The current port of perl has no facilities for internationalization. We are holding off implementing locale support, wide character and multi-byte character support until we find out what is planned for Perl 5. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- System Calls --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The perl command 'syscall' allows a unix perl script to call an arbitrary system call by invoking the syscall(2) system call. There is no corresponding facility within the NT system services. At least I haven't found it yet. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- File Systems --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Due to the differences between the Unix file system concept and the various file systems implemented on NT, the stat command will act differently. There are no inodes associated with files on NT file systems, and since there are no links, the link field is useless. For more information on what is returned from the perl command 'stat', see the help file for the Microsoft C/C++ Runtime Library. The FAT file system has no concept of execute permission and it will only allow a file to be made read-only (write protected). There is no means to read-protect a FAT file. This means that the only valid modes for a FAT file are 0666 (rw-rw-rw) and 0444 (r--r--r--). Be careful looking at modes returned from stat. The NTFS file system offers more features than the FAT file system, but I haven't researched it enough to tell how we can take advantage of it from within perl. As I learn more about NTFS and implement it in the port, I'll mail out information to the mailing list. NOTE: A new pre-defined varible has been added to perl, $FsType. This variable contains a string that is the name of the file system type for the current directory (i.e. FAT, HPFS, or NTFS). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- File Times --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The stat and utime calls seem to have difficulties with Daylight Savings Time. The following perl script fails: open (B, ">b") || die "Can't open b for output: $!\n"; print B "foo\n"; close B; $foo = (utime 500000000,500000001,'b'); ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size, $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks) = stat('b'); print "stat reports times as:\n"; print " atime: $atime ", &ctime($atime); print " mtime: $mtime ", &ctime($mtime); Instead of the atime and mtime being 500000000 and 500000001 as you would expect, they are off by one hour (500003600 and 500003601). This looks like a C/C++ runtime library problem. For the moment, use utime cautiously. We'll try to find a work around while we're waiting for Microsoft to fix the problem(s). --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Command line arguments --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Be careful when porting a perl script that uses the shell's echo command. Besides the problems of wildcard expansion (listed above under Globbing), cmd.exe does not strip white space like a unix shell. The following script illustrates a problem discovered in the Perl Test Suite: $x = `echo foo | perl -e "while (<>) {print $_;}" Ioargv.tmp -`; if ($x eq "a line\nfoo\n") {print "ok 2\n";} else {print "not ok 2\n";} The script failed because of the space between 'foo' and '|' on the first line. The echo command echo's EVERYTHING up to the pipe or redirection or end-of-line. Take this into account when examining input that was piped in by the echo command.