Prerequisites for Compiling Perl on AmigaOS¶

Unix emulation for AmigaOS: ixemul.library

You need the Unix emulation for AmigaOS, whose most important part is ixemul.library. For a minimum setup, get the latest versions of the following packages from the Aminet archives ( <http://www.aminet.net/~aminet/> ):

        ixemul-bin
        ixemul-env-bin
        pdksh-bin
    

Note also that this is a minimum setup; you might want to add other packages of ADE (the Amiga Developers Environment).

Version of Amiga OS

You need at the very least AmigaOS version 2.0. Recommended is version 3.1.

Starting Perl programs under AmigaOS¶

Start your Perl program foo with arguments "arg1 arg2 arg3" the same way as on any other platform, by

        perl foo arg1 arg2 arg3

If you want to specify perl options "-my_opts" to the perl itself (as opposed to your program), use

        perl -my_opts foo arg1 arg2 arg3

Alternately, you can try to get a replacement for the system's Execute command that honors the #!/usr/bin/perl syntax in scripts and set the s-Bit of your scripts. Then you can invoke your scripts like under UNIX with

        foo arg1 arg2 arg3

(Note that having *nixish full path to perl /usr/bin/perl is not necessary, perl would be enough, but having full path would make it easier to use your script under *nix.)

Shortcomings of Perl under AmigaOS¶

Perl under AmigaOS lacks some features of perl under UNIX because of deficiencies in the UNIX-emulation, most notably:

• fork()
• some features of the UNIX filesystem regarding link count and file dates
• inplace operation (the -i switch) without backup file
• umask() works, but the correct permissions are only set when the file is finally close()d

Manpages for Perl on AmigaOS¶

If you have "man" installed on your system, and you installed perl manpages, use something like this:

        man perlfunc
        man less
        man ExtUtils.MakeMaker

to access documentation for different components of Perl. Start with

        man perl

Note: You have to modify your man.conf file to search for manpages in the /ade/lib/perl5/man/man3 directory, or the man pages for the perl library will not be found.

Note that dot (.) is used as a package separator for documentation for packages, and as usual, sometimes you need to give the section - 3 above - to avoid shadowing by the less(1) manpage.

Perl HTML Documentation on AmigaOS¶

If you have some WWW browser available, you can build HTML docs. Cd to directory with .pod files, and do like this

        cd /ade/lib/perl5/pod
        pod2html

After this you can direct your browser the file perl.html in this directory, and go ahead with reading docs.

Alternatively you may be able to get these docs prebuilt from "CPAN".

Perl GNU Info Files on AmigaOS¶

Users of "Emacs" would appreciate it very much, especially with "CPerl" mode loaded. You need to get latest "pod2info" from "CPAN", or, alternately, prebuilt info pages.

Perl LaTeX Documentation on AmigaOS¶

Can be constructed using "pod2latex".

Build Prerequisites for Perl on AmigaOS¶

You need to have the latest ixemul (Unix emulation for Amiga) from Aminet.

Getting the Perl Source for AmigaOS¶

You can either get the latest perl-for-amiga source from Ninemoons and extract it with:

  tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION-src.tgz

or get the official source from CPAN:

  http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0

Extract it like this

  tar xvzpf perl-$VERSION.tar.gz

You will see a message about errors while extracting Configure. This is normal and expected. (There is a conflict with a similarly-named file configure, but it causes no harm.)

Making Perl on AmigaOS¶

Remember to use a hefty wad of stack (I use 2000000)

  sh configure.gnu --prefix=/gg

Now type

  make depend

Now!

  make

Testing Perl on AmigaOS¶

Now run

  make test

Some tests will be skipped because they need the fork() function:

io/pipe.t, op/fork.t, lib/filehand.t, lib/open2.t, lib/open3.t, lib/io_pipe.t, lib/io_sock.t

Installing the built Perl on AmigaOS¶

Run

  make install