=head1 NAME
perlfaq3 - Programming Tools ($Revision: 1.33 $, $Date: 1998/12/29 20:12:12 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
This section of the FAQ answers questions related to programmer tools
and programming support.
=head2 How do I do (anything)?
Have you looked at CPAN (see L<perlfaq2>)? The chances are that
someone has already written a module that can solve your problem.
Have you read the appropriate man pages? Here's a brief index:
Basics perldata, perlvar, perlsyn, perlop, perlsub
Execution perlrun, perldebug
Functions perlfunc
Objects perlref, perlmod, perlobj, perltie
Data Structures perlref, perllol, perldsc
Modules perlmod, perlmodlib, perlsub
Regexps perlre, perlfunc, perlop, perllocale
Moving to perl5 perltrap, perl
Linking w/C perlxstut, perlxs, perlcall, perlguts, perlembed
Various http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/FMTEYEWTK/index.html
(not a man-page but still useful)
L<perltoc> provides a crude table of contents for the perl man page set.
=head2 How can I use Perl interactively?
The typical approach uses the Perl debugger, described in the
perldebug(1) man page, on an ``empty'' program, like this:
perl -de 42
Now just type in any legal Perl code, and it will be immediately
evaluated. You can also examine the symbol table, get stack
backtraces, check variable values, set breakpoints, and other
operations typically found in symbolic debuggers.
=head2 Is there a Perl shell?
In general, no. The Shell.pm module (distributed with perl) makes
perl try commands which aren't part of the Perl language as shell
commands. perlsh from the source distribution is simplistic and
uninteresting, but may still be what you want.
=head2 How do I debug my Perl programs?
Have you used C<-w>? It enables warnings for dubious practices.
Have you tried C<use strict>? It prevents you from using symbolic
references, makes you predeclare any subroutines that you call as bare
words, and (probably most importantly) forces you to predeclare your
variables with C<my> or C<use vars>.
Did you check the returns of each and every system call? The operating
system (and thus Perl) tells you whether they worked or not, and if not
why.
open(FH, "> /etc/cantwrite")
or die "Couldn't write to /etc/cantwrite: $!\n";
Did you read L<perltrap>? It's full of gotchas for old and new Perl
programmers, and even has sections for those of you who are upgrading
from languages like I<awk> and I<C>.
Have you tried the Perl debugger, described in L<perldebug>? You can
step through your program and see what it's doing and thus work out
why what it's doing isn't what it should be doing.
=head2 How do I profile my Perl programs?
You should get the Devel::DProf module from CPAN, and also use
Benchmark.pm from the standard distribution. Benchmark lets you time
specific portions of your code, while Devel::DProf gives detailed
breakdowns of where your code spends its time.
Here's a sample use of Benchmark:
use Benchmark;
@junk = `cat /etc/motd`;
$count = 10_000;
timethese($count, {
'map' => sub { my @a = @junk;
map { s/a/b/ } @a;
return @a
},
'for' => sub { my @a = @junk;
local $_;
for (@a) { s/a/b/ };
return @a },
});
This is what it prints (on one machine--your results will be dependent
on your hardware, operating system, and the load on your machine):
Benchmark: timing 10000 iterations of for, map...
for: 4 secs ( 3.97 usr 0.01 sys = 3.98 cpu)
map: 6 secs ( 4.97 usr 0.00 sys = 4.97 cpu)
Be aware that a good benchmark is very hard to write. It only tests the
data you give it, and really proves little about differing complexities
of contrasting algorithms.
=head2 How do I cross-reference my Perl programs?
The B::Xref module, shipped with the new, alpha-release Perl compiler
(not the general distribution prior to the 5.005 release), can be used
to generate cross-reference reports for Perl programs.
perl -MO=Xref[,OPTIONS] scriptname.plx
=head2 Is there a pretty-printer (formatter) for Perl?
There is no program that will reformat Perl as much as indent(1) does
for C. The complex feedback between the scanner and the parser (this
feedback is what confuses the vgrind and emacs programs) makes it
challenging at best to write a stand-alone Perl parser.
Of course, if you simply follow the guidelines in L<perlstyle>, you
shouldn't need to reformat. The habit of formatting your code as you
write it will help prevent bugs. Your editor can and should help you
with this. The perl-mode for emacs can provide a remarkable amount of
help with most (but not all) code, and even less programmable editors
can provide significant assistance. Tom swears by the following
settings in vi and its clones:
set ai sw=4
map ^O {^M}^[O^T
Now put that in your F<.exrc> file (replacing the caret characters
with control characters) and away you go. In insert mode, ^T is
for indenting, ^D is for undenting, and ^O is for blockdenting --
as it were. If you haven't used the last one, you're missing
a lot. A more complete example, with comments, can be found at
http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/authors/id/TOMC/scripts/toms.exrc.gz
If you are used to using the I<vgrind> program for printing out nice code
to a laser printer, you can take a stab at this using
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/misc/tips/working.vgrind.entry, but the
results are not particularly satisfying for sophisticated code.
The a2ps at http://www.infres.enst.fr/~demaille/a2ps/ does lots of things
related to generating nicely printed output of documents.
=head2 Is there a etags/ctags for perl?
With respect to the source code for the Perl interpreter, yes.
There has been support for etags in the source for a long time.
Ctags was introduced in v5.005_54 (and probably 5.005_03).
After building perl, type 'make etags' or 'make ctags' and both
sets of tag files will be built.
Now, if you're looking to build a tag file for perl code, then there's
a simple one at
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/TOMC/scripts/ptags.gz which may do
the trick. And if not, it's easy to hack into what you want.
=head2 Is there an IDE or Windows Perl Editor?
If you're on Unix, you already have an IDE -- Unix itself.
You just have to learn the toolbox. If you're not, then you
probably don't have a toolbox, so may need something else.
PerlBuilder (XXX URL to follow) is an integrated development
environment for Windows that supports Perl development. Perl programs
are just plain text, though, so you could download emacs for Windows
(XXX) or vim for win32 (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~tmgil/vi.html). If
you're transferring Windows files to Unix, be sure to transfer in
ASCII mode so the ends of lines are appropriately converted.
=head2 Where can I get Perl macros for vi?
For a complete version of Tom Christiansen's vi configuration file,
see http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/toms.exrc.gz,
the standard benchmark file for vi emulators. This runs best with nvi,
the current version of vi out of Berkeley, which incidentally can be built
with an embedded Perl interpreter -- see http://www.perl.com/CPAN/src/misc.
=head2 Where can I get perl-mode for emacs?
Since Emacs version 19 patchlevel 22 or so, there have been both a
perl-mode.el and support for the perl debugger built in. These should
come with the standard Emacs 19 distribution.
In the perl source directory, you'll find a directory called "emacs",
which contains a cperl-mode that color-codes keywords, provides
context-sensitive help, and other nifty things.
Note that the perl-mode of emacs will have fits with C<"main'foo">
(single quote), and mess up the indentation and hilighting. You
are probably using C<"main::foo"> in new Perl code anyway, so this
shouldn't be an issue.
=head2 How can I use curses with Perl?
The Curses module from CPAN provides a dynamically loadable object
module interface to a curses library. A small demo can be found at the
directory http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/rep;
this program repeats a command and updates the screen as needed, rendering
B<rep ps axu> similar to B<top>.
=head2 How can I use X or Tk with Perl?
Tk is a completely Perl-based, object-oriented interface to the Tk toolkit
that doesn't force you to use Tcl just to get at Tk. Sx is an interface
to the Athena Widget set. Both are available from CPAN. See the
directory http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-category/08_User_Interfaces/
Invaluable for Perl/Tk programming are: the Perl/Tk FAQ at
http://w4.lns.cornell.edu/~pvhp/ptk/ptkTOC.html , the Perl/Tk Reference
Guide available at
http://www.perl.com/CPAN-local/authors/Stephen_O_Lidie/ , and the
online manpages at
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~amundson/perl/perltk/toc.html .
=head2 How can I generate simple menus without using CGI or Tk?
The http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/SKUNZ/perlmenu.v4.0.tar.gz
module, which is curses-based, can help with this.
=head2 What is undump?
See the next questions.
=head2 How can I make my Perl program run faster?
The best way to do this is to come up with a better algorithm. This
can often make a dramatic difference. Chapter 8 in the Camel has some
efficiency tips in it you might want to look at. Jon Bentley's book
``Programming Pearls'' (that's not a misspelling!) has some good tips
on optimization, too. Advice on benchmarking boils down to: benchmark
and profile to make sure you're optimizing the right part, look for
better algorithms instead of microtuning your code, and when all else
fails consider just buying faster hardware.
A different approach is to autoload seldom-used Perl code. See the
AutoSplit and AutoLoader modules in the standard distribution for
that. Or you could locate the bottleneck and think about writing just
that part in C, the way we used to take bottlenecks in C code and
write them in assembler. Similar to rewriting in C is the use of
modules that have critical sections written in C (for instance, the
PDL module from CPAN).
In some cases, it may be worth it to use the backend compiler to
produce byte code (saving compilation time) or compile into C, which
will certainly save compilation time and sometimes a small amount (but
not much) execution time. See the question about compiling your Perl
programs for more on the compiler--the wins aren't as obvious as you'd
hope.
If you're currently linking your perl executable to a shared I<libc.so>,
you can often gain a 10-25% performance benefit by rebuilding it to
link with a static libc.a instead. This will make a bigger perl
executable, but your Perl programs (and programmers) may thank you for
it. See the F<INSTALL> file in the source distribution for more
information.
Unsubstantiated reports allege that Perl interpreters that use sfio
outperform those that don't (for IO intensive applications). To try
this, see the F<INSTALL> file in the source distribution, especially
the ``Selecting File IO mechanisms'' section.
The undump program was an old attempt to speed up your Perl program
by storing the already-compiled form to disk. This is no longer
a viable option, as it only worked on a few architectures, and
wasn't a good solution anyway.
=head2 How can I make my Perl program take less memory?
When it comes to time-space tradeoffs, Perl nearly always prefers to
throw memory at a problem. Scalars in Perl use more memory than
strings in C, arrays take more than that, and hashes use even more. While
there's still a lot to be done, recent releases have been addressing
these issues. For example, as of 5.004, duplicate hash keys are
shared amongst all hashes using them, so require no reallocation.
In some cases, using substr() or vec() to simulate arrays can be
highly beneficial. For example, an array of a thousand booleans will
take at least 20,000 bytes of space, but it can be turned into one
125-byte bit vector for a considerable memory savings. The standard
Tie::SubstrHash module can also help for certain types of data
structure. If you're working with specialist data structures
(matrices, for instance) modules that implement these in C may use
less memory than equivalent Perl modules.
Another thing to try is learning whether your Perl was compiled with
the system malloc or with Perl's builtin malloc. Whichever one it
is, try using the other one and see whether this makes a difference.
Information about malloc is in the F<INSTALL> file in the source
distribution. You can find out whether you are using perl's malloc by
typing C<perl -V:usemymalloc>.
=head2 Is it unsafe to return a pointer to local data?
No, Perl's garbage collection system takes care of this.
sub makeone {
my @a = ( 1 .. 10 );
return \@a;
}
for $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
push @many, makeone();
}
print $many[4][5], "\n";
print "@many\n";
=head2 How can I free an array or hash so my program shrinks?
You can't. On most operating systems, memory allocated to a program
can never be returned to the system. That's why long-running programs
sometimes re-exec themselves. Some operating systems (notably,
FreeBSD and Linux) allegedly reclaim large chunks of memory that is no
longer used, but it doesn't appear to happen with Perl (yet). The Mac
appears to be the only platform that will reliably (albeit, slowly)
return memory to the OS.
We've had reports that on Linux (Redhat 5.1) on Intel, C<undef
$scalar> will return memory to the system, while on Solaris 2.6 it
won't. In general, try it yourself and see.
However, judicious use of my() on your variables will help make sure
that they go out of scope so that Perl can free up their storage for
use in other parts of your program. A global variable, of course, never
goes out of scope, so you can't get its space automatically reclaimed,
although undef()ing and/or delete()ing it will achieve the same effect.
In general, memory allocation and de-allocation isn't something you can
or should be worrying about much in Perl, but even this capability
(preallocation of data types) is in the works.
=head2 How can I make my CGI script more efficient?
Beyond the normal measures described to make general Perl programs
faster or smaller, a CGI program has additional issues. It may be run
several times per second. Given that each time it runs it will need
to be re-compiled and will often allocate a megabyte or more of system
memory, this can be a killer. Compiling into C B<isn't going to help
you> because the process start-up overhead is where the bottleneck is.
There are two popular ways to avoid this overhead. One solution
involves running the Apache HTTP server (available from
http://www.apache.org/) with either of the mod_perl or mod_fastcgi
plugin modules.
With mod_perl and the Apache::Registry module (distributed with
mod_perl), httpd will run with an embedded Perl interpreter which
pre-compiles your script and then executes it within the same address
space without forking. The Apache extension also gives Perl access to
the internal server API, so modules written in Perl can do just about
anything a module written in C can. For more on mod_perl, see
http://perl.apache.org/
With the FCGI module (from CPAN) and the mod_fastcgi
module (available from http://www.fastcgi.com/) each of your perl
scripts becomes a permanent CGI daemon process.
Both of these solutions can have far-reaching effects on your system
and on the way you write your CGI scripts, so investigate them with
care.
See http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-category/15_World_Wide_Web_HTML_HTTP_CGI/ .
A non-free, commercial product, ``The Velocity Engine for Perl'',
(http://www.binevolve.com/ or
also be worth looking at. It will allow you to increase the performance
of your perl scripts, upto 25 times faster than normal CGI perl by
running in persistent perl mode, or 4 to 5 times faster without any
modification to your existing CGI scripts. Fully functional evaluation
copies are available from the web site.
=head2 How can I hide the source for my Perl program?
Delete it. :-) Seriously, there are a number of (mostly
unsatisfactory) solutions with varying levels of ``security''.
First of all, however, you I<can't> take away read permission, because
the source code has to be readable in order to be compiled and
interpreted. (That doesn't mean that a CGI script's source is
readable by people on the web, though, only by people with access to
the filesystem) So you have to leave the permissions at the socially
friendly 0755 level.
Some people regard this as a security problem. If your program does
insecure things, and relies on people not knowing how to exploit those
insecurities, it is not secure. It is often possible for someone to
determine the insecure things and exploit them without viewing the
source. Security through obscurity, the name for hiding your bugs
instead of fixing them, is little security indeed.
You can try using encryption via source filters (Filter::* from CPAN),
but any decent programmer will be able to decrypt it. You can try using
the byte code compiler and interpreter described below, but the curious
might still be able to de-compile it. You can try using the native-code
compiler described below, but crackers might be able to disassemble it.
These pose varying degrees of difficulty to people wanting to get at
your code, but none can definitively conceal it (this is true of every
language, not just Perl).
If you're concerned about people profiting from your code, then the
bottom line is that nothing but a restrictive licence will give you
legal security. License your software and pepper it with threatening
statements like ``This is unpublished proprietary software of XYZ Corp.
Your access to it does not give you permission to use it blah blah
blah.'' We are not lawyers, of course, so you should see a lawyer if
you want to be sure your licence's wording will stand up in court.
=head2 How can I compile my Perl program into byte code or C?
Malcolm Beattie has written a multifunction backend compiler,
available from CPAN, that can do both these things. It is included
in the perl5.005 release, but is still considered experimental.
This means it's fun to play with if you're a programmer but not
really for people looking for turn-key solutions.
Merely compiling into C does not in and of itself guarantee that your
code will run very much faster. That's because except for lucky cases
where a lot of native type inferencing is possible, the normal Perl
run time system is still present and so your program will take just as
long to run and be just as big. Most programs save little more than
compilation time, leaving execution no more than 10-30% faster. A few
rare programs actually benefit significantly (like several times
faster), but this takes some tweaking of your code.
You'll probably be astonished to learn that the current version of the
compiler generates a compiled form of your script whose executable is
just as big as the original perl executable, and then some. That's
because as currently written, all programs are prepared for a full
eval() statement. You can tremendously reduce this cost by building a
shared I<libperl.so> library and linking against that. See the
F<INSTALL> podfile in the perl source distribution for details. If
you link your main perl binary with this, it will make it miniscule.
For example, on one author's system, F</usr/bin/perl> is only 11k in
size!
In general, the compiler will do nothing to make a Perl program smaller,
faster, more portable, or more secure. In fact, it will usually hurt
all of those. The executable will be bigger, your VM system may take
longer to load the whole thing, the binary is fragile and hard to fix,
and compilation never stopped software piracy in the form of crackers,
viruses, or bootleggers. The real advantage of the compiler is merely
packaging, and once you see the size of what it makes (well, unless
you use a shared I<libperl.so>), you'll probably want a complete
Perl install anyway.
=head2 How can I compile Perl into Java?
You can't. Not yet, anyway. You can integrate Java and Perl with the
Perl Resource Kit from O'Reilly and Associates. See
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/prkunix/ for more information.
The Java interface will be supported in the core 5.006 release
of Perl.
=head2 How can I get C<#!perl> to work on [MS-DOS,NT,...]?
For OS/2 just use
extproc perl -S -your_switches
as the first line in C<*.cmd> file (C<-S> due to a bug in cmd.exe's
`extproc' handling). For DOS one should first invent a corresponding
batch file, and codify it in C<ALTERNATIVE_SHEBANG> (see the
F<INSTALL> file in the source distribution for more information).
The Win95/NT installation, when using the ActiveState port of Perl,
will modify the Registry to associate the C<.pl> extension with the
perl interpreter. If you install another port (Gurusamy Sarathy's is
the recommended Win95/NT port), or (eventually) build your own
Win95/NT Perl using a Windows port of gcc (e.g., with cygwin32 or
mingw32), then you'll have to modify the Registry yourself. In
addition to associating C<.pl> with the interpreter, NT people can
use: C<SET PATHEXT=%PATHEXT%;.PL> to let them run the program
C<install-linux.pl> merely by typing C<install-linux>.
Macintosh perl scripts will have the appropriate Creator and
Type, so that double-clicking them will invoke the perl application.
I<IMPORTANT!>: Whatever you do, PLEASE don't get frustrated, and just
throw the perl interpreter into your cgi-bin directory, in order to
get your scripts working for a web server. This is an EXTREMELY big
security risk. Take the time to figure out how to do it correctly.
=head2 Can I write useful perl programs on the command line?
Yes. Read L<perlrun> for more information. Some examples follow.
(These assume standard Unix shell quoting rules.)
# sum first and last fields
perl -lane 'print $F[0] + $F[-1]' *
# identify text files
perl -le 'for(@ARGV) {print if -f && -T _}' *
# remove (most) comments from C program
perl -0777 -pe 's{/\*.*?\*/}{}gs' foo.c
# make file a month younger than today, defeating reaper daemons
perl -e '$X=24*60*60; utime(time(),time() + 30 * $X,@ARGV)' *
# find first unused uid
perl -le '$i++ while getpwuid($i); print $i'
# display reasonable manpath
echo $PATH | perl -nl -072 -e '
s![^/+]*$!man!&&-d&&!$s{$_}++&&push@m,$_;END{print"@m"}'
Ok, the last one was actually an obfuscated perl entry. :-)
=head2 Why don't perl one-liners work on my DOS/Mac/VMS system?
The problem is usually that the command interpreters on those systems
have rather different ideas about quoting than the Unix shells under
which the one-liners were created. On some systems, you may have to
change single-quotes to double ones, which you must I<NOT> do on Unix
or Plan9 systems. You might also have to change a single % to a %%.
For example:
# Unix
perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"'
# DOS, etc.
perl -e "print \"Hello world\n\""
# Mac
print "Hello world\n"
(then Run "Myscript" or Shift-Command-R)
# VMS
perl -e "print ""Hello world\n"""
The problem is that none of this is reliable: it depends on the
command interpreter. Under Unix, the first two often work. Under DOS,
it's entirely possible neither works. If 4DOS was the command shell,
you'd probably have better luck like this:
perl -e "print <Ctrl-x>"Hello world\n<Ctrl-x>""
Under the Mac, it depends which environment you are using. The MacPerl
shell, or MPW, is much like Unix shells in its support for several
quoting variants, except that it makes free use of the Mac's non-ASCII
characters as control characters.
Using qq(), q(), and qx(), instead of "double quotes", 'single
quotes', and `backticks`, may make one-liners easier to write.
There is no general solution to all of this. It is a mess, pure and
simple. Sucks to be away from Unix, huh? :-)
[Some of this answer was contributed by Kenneth Albanowski.]
=head2 Where can I learn about CGI or Web programming in Perl?
For modules, get the CGI or LWP modules from CPAN. For textbooks,
see the two especially dedicated to web stuff in the question on
books. For problems and questions related to the web, like ``Why
do I get 500 Errors'' or ``Why doesn't it run from the browser right
when it runs fine on the command line'', see these sources:
WWW Security FAQ
http://www.w3.org/Security/Faq/
Web FAQ
http://www.boutell.com/faq/
CGI FAQ
http://www.webthing.com/tutorials/cgifaq.html
HTTP Spec
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Protocols/HTTP/
HTML Spec
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/
CGI Spec
http://www.w3.org/CGI/
CGI Security FAQ
http://www.go2net.com/people/paulp/cgi-security/safe-cgi.txt
Also take a look at L<perlfaq9>
=head2 Where can I learn about object-oriented Perl programming?
L<perltoot> is a good place to start, and you can use L<perlobj> and
L<perlbot> for reference. Perltoot didn't come out until the 5.004
release, but you can get a copy (in pod, html, or postscript) from
http://www.perl.com/CPAN/doc/FMTEYEWTK/ .
=head2 Where can I learn about linking C with Perl? [h2xs, xsubpp]
If you want to call C from Perl, start with L<perlxstut>,
moving on to L<perlxs>, L<xsubpp>, and L<perlguts>. If you want to
call Perl from C, then read L<perlembed>, L<perlcall>, and
L<perlguts>. Don't forget that you can learn a lot from looking at
how the authors of existing extension modules wrote their code and
solved their problems.
=head2 I've read perlembed, perlguts, etc., but I can't embed perl in
my C program, what am I doing wrong?
Download the ExtUtils::Embed kit from CPAN and run `make test'. If
the tests pass, read the pods again and again and again. If they
fail, see L<perlbug> and send a bugreport with the output of
C<make test TEST_VERBOSE=1> along with C<perl -V>.
=head2 When I tried to run my script, I got this message. What does it
mean?
L<perldiag> has a complete list of perl's error messages and warnings,
with explanatory text. You can also use the splain program (distributed
with perl) to explain the error messages:
perl program 2>diag.out
splain [-v] [-p] diag.out
or change your program to explain the messages for you:
use diagnostics;
or
use diagnostics -verbose;
=head2 What's MakeMaker?
This module (part of the standard perl distribution) is designed to
write a Makefile for an extension module from a Makefile.PL. For more
information, see L<ExtUtils::MakeMaker>.
=head1 AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-1999 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.
All rights reserved.
When included as an integrated part of the Standard Distribution
of Perl or of its documentation (printed or otherwise), this work is
covered under Perl's Artistic Licence. For separate distributions of
all or part of this FAQ outside of that, see L<perlfaq>.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples here are public
domain. You are permitted and encouraged to use this code and any
derivatives thereof in your own programs for fun or for profit as you
see fit. A simple comment in the code giving credit to the FAQ would
be courteous but is not required.