PERLHURD(1)

✨ PERLHURD(1) ✨

okay bestie, welcome to perlhurd — the lil page that spills all the tea about running Perl version 5 on the Hurd 🦋 (that's the GNU Hurd, manual section 1, Perl Programmers Reference Guide vibes). sit down, grab a snack 🍓, and let's get into it.

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💖 NAME 💖

perlhurd — literally just: Perl version 5 on Hurd. that's the whole name, she's simple, she's iconic, periodt.

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🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so if you wanna use Perl on the Hurd, here's the move: use the Debian GNU/Hurd distribution (peep <https://www.debian.org/>) 👑. yes, even though an official, stable release has not yet been made — it's still the one, trust. the old gnu-0.2 binary distribution? girl. that one will most certainly come with additional problems. not the vibe. 💀

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🎀 Known Problems with Perl on Hurd 🎀

ngl the Perl test suite may still report some errors on the Hurd, and that's just the situation rn. the lib/anydbm and pragma/warnings tests will almost certainly fail 😭. and listen — both of those failures are not really specific to the Hurd, as indicated by the test suite output. so don't blame the Hurd for everything, she's got her own stuff going on.

the socket tests may fail if the network is not configured 🌐. to fix that you have to make /hurd/pfinet the translator for /servers/socket/2, and give it the right arguments. try /hurd/pfinet --help for more information — she'll tell you what she needs, fr fr.

here are the statistics for Perl 5.005_62 on my system, no cap:

 Failed Test  Status Wstat Total Fail  Failed  List of failed
 -----------------------------------------------------------------------
 lib/anydbm.t                 12    1   8.33%  12
 pragma/warnings             333    1   0.30%  215

 8 tests and 24 subtests skipped.
 Failed 2/229 test scripts, 99.13% okay. 2/10850 subtests failed,
    99.98% okay.

and honestly? there are quite a few systems out there that do worse! 🔥 99.98% okay is eating, actually.

but heads up bestie — since I am running a very recent Hurd snapshot, in which a lot of bugs that were exposed by the Perl test suite have been fixed, you may encounter more failures. likely candidates are: op/stat, lib/io_pipe, lib/io_sock, lib/io_udp and lib/time 👀.

in any way, if you're seeing failures beyond those mentioned in this document, please consider upgrading to the latest Hurd before reporting the failure as a bug 🙈. don't come for the Hurd when the Hurd is fine, iykyk.

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

Mark Kettenis <kettenis@gnu.org> — the main character who wrote this, we stan 🫶

Last Updated: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 22:50:30 +0200 ⭐

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this lil doc is from perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03 — so yeah, she's been out here serving Hurd knowledge this whole time and she's still iconic 💅✨ bye!! 🌈🎀