PLAN9/PERLPLAN9(1)   (perl 5.003, patch 05)    PLAN9/PERLPLAN9(1)

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          perlplan9 - Plan 9-specific documentation for Perl

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          These are a few notes describing features peculiar to Plan 9
          Perl. As such, it is not intended to be a replacement for
          the rest of the Perl 5 documentation (which is both copious
          and excellent). If you have any questions to which you can't
          find answers in these man pages, contact Luther Huffman at
          lutherh@stratcom.com and we'll try to answer them.

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          Perl is invoked from the command line as described in the
          _p_e_r_l manpage. Most perl scripts, however, do have a first
          line such as "#!/usr/local/bin/perl". This is known as a
          shebang (shell-bang) statement and tells the OS shell where
          to find the perl interpreter. In Plan 9 Perl this statement
          should be "#!/bin/perl" if you wish to be able to directly
          invoke the script by its name.
               Alternatively, you may invoke perl with the command
          "Perl" instead of "perl". This will produce Acme-friendly
          error messages of the form "filename:18".

          Some scripts, usually identified with a *.PL extension, are
          self-configuring and are able to correctly create their own
          shebang path from config information located in Plan 9 Perl.
          These you won't need to be worried about.

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          Although Plan 9 Perl currently only  provides static
          loading, it is built with a number of useful extensions.
          These include Opcode, FileHandle, Fcntl, and POSIX. Expect
          to see others (and DynaLoading!) in the future.

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          As mentioned previously, dynamic loading isn't currently
          available nor is MakeMaker. Both are high-priority items.

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          Some, such as chown and umask aren't provided because the
          concept does not exist within Plan 9. Others, such as some
          of the socket-related functions, simply haven't been written
          yet. Many in the latter category may be supported in the
          future.

          The functions not currently implemented include:

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     PLAN9/PERLPLAN9(1)   (perl 5.003, patch 05)    PLAN9/PERLPLAN9(1)

              chown, chroot, dbmclose, dbmopen, getsockopt,
              setsockopt, recvmsg, sendmsg, getnetbyname,
              getnetbyaddr, getnetent, getprotoent, getservent,
              sethostent, setnetent, setprotoent, setservent,
              endservent, endnetent, endprotoent, umask

          There may be several other functions that have undefined
          behavior so this list shouldn't be considered complete.

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          For compatibility with perl scripts written for the Unix
          environment, Plan 9 Perl uses the POSIX signal emulation
          provided in Plan 9's ANSI POSIX Environment (APE). Signal
          stacking isn't supported. The signals provided are:

              SIGHUP, SIGINT, SIGQUIT, SIGILL, SIGABRT,
              SIGFPE, SIGKILL, SIGSEGV, SIGPIPE, SIGPIPE, SIGALRM,
              SIGTERM, SIGUSR1, SIGUSR2, SIGCHLD, SIGCONT,
              SIGSTOP, SIGTSTP, SIGTTIN, SIGTTOU

     BBBBUUUUGGGGSSSS
          "As many as there are grains of sand on all the beaches of
          the world . . ." - Carl Sagan

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          This document was revised 09-October-1996 for Perl 5.003_7.

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          Luther Huffman,    lutherh@stratcom.com

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